WORKS

Featured Work:
The Skin of Our Teeth

By Ashley Gallagher

Plot Summary
“We came through the depression by the skin of our teeth, — that’s true! — one more tight squeeze like that and where will we be?”¹ Wilder prepares the audience, through the voice of Sabina, the Antrobus family’s melodramatic maid, for the “cosmic allegory” that serves as the framework for The Skin of Our Teeth.² In Act I, the Antrobus family is portrayed as the typical American family and a prime specimen of the human race, comprised of Mr. Antrobus, inventor of the wheel and the alphabet, Mrs. Antrobus, his wife, and their two children: Henry and Gladys. The Antrobus’s live in Excelsior, New Jersey during the Ice Age. As the audience soon discovers, the Ice Age is only the first of three disasters through which the family must struggle to survive in order to rebuild their community. Aesthetically, The Skin of Our Teeth is similar to Wilder’s first Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Our Town, in that both exhibit nonrealistic sets and break the fourth wall. Yet, The Skin of Our Teeth goes a step further; Wilder’s writing style facilitates “a double narrative: the story of the Antrobus family in the play and the story of a theater company putting on the play.”³ For example, in the very beginning of Act I, Mr. Fitzpatrick, the stage manager, calls from off stage for Sabina, whom the audience discovers is really an actress named Miss Somerset, to stall while they await Mrs. Antrobus’s entrance. Miss Somerset shakily continues her monologue as Sabina before stopping to complain about the play The Skin of Our Teeth as Miss Somerset. Sabina’s scripted ad lib is brought to a close upon Mrs. Antrobus’s entrance. During Mrs. Antrobus’s interaction with her children, Henry and Gladys, the audience learns that Henry is, in fact, Cain who, according to scripture and The Skin of Our Teeth’s allusions, killed his brother Abel. When Mr. Antrobus finally arrives home he invites refugees — Homer, Moses, and three of the Muses — to warm themselves by the fire or, allegorically, to save the human race. Act II finds the Antrobus’s after the Ice Age at an Atlantic City convention. Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus are interviewed about Mr. Antrobus’s presidency of the Ancient and Honorable Order of Mammals, Human Subdivision, and the couple’s five thousandth wedding anniversary. Shortly thereafter Sabina, winner of a beauty contest judged earlier by Mr. Antrobus, schemes to steal Mr. Antrobus away from his wife. However, just as Mr. Antrobus readies himself to leave with Sabina, he regains his senses and realizes the world is about to be flooded. Transforming into a Noah figure, Mr. Antrobus gathers the animals two by two into a boat; his family and Sabina narrowly escape extinction once again. The opening of the third act of Skin of Our Teeth is interrupted by Mr. Fitzpatrick so that he can reassign the roles of actors, who have suddenly taken ill, to the theater staff. Sabina then resumes her search for the Antrobus family now that the war has finally come to an end. In his reference to war, Wilder provided hope to those Americans troubled about World War II at the time of the play’s premiere. Mr. Antrobus and Henry return from war to Excelsior, haggard and hateful of one another. The actor playing Henry, seen now as a “representation of strong unreconciled evil,” lunges at the actor playing his father, but Sabina steps between the two men, ending the fight.⁴ As the tension begins to settle, Mr. Antrobus admits that he does not have the strength or desire to rebuild society again. Yet, upon discovering that his books have been saved, Mr. Antrobus’s will to begin again is revived. Sabina closes Act III by repeating a portion of her Act I opening monologue and announces that the end of the play has not yet been written. She advises the audience to go home, sends the Antrobus’s good tidings, and ultimately reassures the audience of the family’s confidence in overcoming the threats to their survival yet again.

_____________________
¹Wilder, 218
²Konkle, 155
³Konkle, 156
⁴Wilder, 276

Critical Analysis
The Skin of Our Teeth premiered at the Plymouth Theater in New York on November 18, 1942. Influenced by James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and “German expressionism, vaudeville, burlesque, and Wilder’s own one-acts,” Skin of Our Teeth pays homage to those sources in its depiction of the Antrobus family.⁵ In his preface to Three Plays Wilder writes, “I should be very happy if, in the future, some author should feel similarly indebted to any work of mine. Literature has always more resembled a torch race than a furious dispute among heirs” (687). The main characters of Skin of Our Teeth, the Antrobus’s, whose name is reminiscent of the Greek word “anthropos” meaning man, are portrayed as the first family of the human race struggling to survive disaster after disaster. George Antrobus is described as an Adam figure in Act I and his wife, Maggie, is his Eve. The couple’s son, Cain, is a symbol of violence while their daughter Gladys, who is chastised by her mother for pulling up her dress, represents man’s instinct to procreate. Lilly Sabina is linked with Mrs. Antrobus as Eve’s temptress side as well as Lilith of the Talmudic tradition.⁶ Wilder’s archetypal characters, however, are not solely defined by what they represent. Genuine humanity often comes through in the separation of actor from role. As Skin of Our Teeth progresses, identity and time are in constant flux. Time switches back and forth frequently between the audience’s present and the continuously changing time of the Antrobus’s. Yet, as each new crisis arises, the same evils are present and the same rebuilding must commence. The play’s title in itself “announces the theme, which is that no matter how hard pressed or frightened, the human race has [the] power to survive.”⁷ As the audience can see, Wilder’s characters must deal not just with questions about their humanity and relationships but also with their basic survival: What shall we eat? How shall we keep warm? Wilder also connects the play with the real sacrifices being made during World War II and the collapse of western culture and the spread of violence.⁸ The stage manager, Mr. Fitzpatrick, plays a different role than Our Town’s stage manager; he becomes the problem solver. When Miss Somerset stops the action to complain about a scene and actors fall sick from food poisoning, Mr. Fitzpatrick is on hand to fix the situation. He is also the link between “the transcendental area and [the] here-and-now.”⁹ But, beyond their dissimilar stage managers, Our Town and Skin of Our Teeth are essentially about American families “struggling with implacable fate and their own smallness.”¹⁰ By the end of Act III, George Antrobus has reaffirmed his desire to rebuild the world, dramatizing “the human race…in the process of getting it right.”¹¹

_____________________
⁵Goldstein, 118
⁶Papajewski, 117
⁷Goldstein, 188
⁸Streasu, 62
⁹Papajewski, 123
¹⁰Castronovo, 99
¹¹Konkle, 161