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The Skin of Our Teeth
The Skin of Our Teeth is a play by Thornton Wilder that won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It opened on October 15, 1942, at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, before moving to the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway on November 18, 1942. It was produced by Michael Myerberg and directed by Elia Kazan with costumes by Mary Percy Schenck. The play is a three-part allegory about the life of mankind, centering on the Antrobus family of the fictional town of Excelsior, New Jersey. The epic comedy-drama is noted as among the most heterodox of classic American comedies, as it breaks nearly every established convention of theatrical performances that was in effect when Wilder wrote it.
The phrase used as the title comes from the King James Bible, Job 19:20: "My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth."
The main characters of the play are George and Maggie Antrobus (from Greek: άνθρωπος (anthropos), "human" or "person"), their two children, Henry and Gladys, and Sabina, who appears as the family's maid in the first and third acts, and as a beauty queen temptress in the second act. The play's action takes place in a modern setting, but is full of anachronisms reaching back to prehistoric times. The characters' roles as archetypes are emphasized by their identification with Biblical and classical personalities:
The name Lilly Sabina is a reference to the myth of Lilith and to the historical rape of the Sabine women, identifications made relatively explicit in the play's text. Henry Antrobus's name was changed from "Cain", following his murder of his brother Abel, mirroring the biblical story in which Adam's son murders his brother after God favors Abel over Cain by gifts. This implies that George Antrobus is Adam and Maggie Antrobus Eve, supported when George composes a song for his wife Maggie in honor of their anniversary: "Happy w'dding ann'vers'ry dear Eva."
The murder of Abel is an underlying theme in the play. Mr. Antrobus pays far more attention to his "perfect" third child Gladys than he does Henry. As this treatment of Henry continues, Henry's anger progresses throughout the play, reaching its climax in the third act.
While the Antrobus family remains constant throughout the play, the three acts do not form a continuous narrative. The first act takes place during an impending ice age; in the second act the family circumstances have changed as George becomes president of the Fraternal Order of Mammals (apparent references to Sodom and Gomorrah but also to the Roaring Twenties), while the end of the world approaches a second time; the third act opens with Maggie and Gladys emerging from a bunker at the end of a seven-year-long war.
An additional layer of stylistic complexity is added by the occasional interruption of the recitative narrative scene by actors directly addressing the audience: In the first scene, the actress playing Sabina reveals her misgivings to the audience about the play; in the second act, she refuses to recite her lines and instead talks to the spectators, which causes a woman in the audience to run from the theater sobbing; and in the third act, the actor playing Mr. Antrobus interrupts to announce that several actors have taken ill and asks the audience to indulge them while the "stage manager" of the play conducts a rehearsal with the replacements.
Act I is an amalgam of early 20th century New Jersey and the dawn of the Ice Age. The father is inventing things such as the lever, the wheel, the alphabet, and multiplication tables. The family and the entire Northeastern U.S. face extinction by a wall of ice moving southward from Canada. The story is introduced by a narrator and further expanded by the family maid, Sabina. There are unsettling parallels between the members of the Antrobus family and various characters from the Bible. In addition, time is compressed and scrambled to such an extent that the refugees who arrive at the Antrobus house seeking food and fire include the Old Testament prophet Moses, the ancient Greek poet Homer, and women who are identified as Muses.
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The Skin of Our Teeth
The Skin of Our Teeth is a play by Thornton Wilder that won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It opened on October 15, 1942, at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, before moving to the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway on November 18, 1942. It was produced by Michael Myerberg and directed by Elia Kazan with costumes by Mary Percy Schenck. The play is a three-part allegory about the life of mankind, centering on the Antrobus family of the fictional town of Excelsior, New Jersey. The epic comedy-drama is noted as among the most heterodox of classic American comedies, as it breaks nearly every established convention of theatrical performances that was in effect when Wilder wrote it.
The phrase used as the title comes from the King James Bible, Job 19:20: "My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth."
The main characters of the play are George and Maggie Antrobus (from Greek: άνθρωπος (anthropos), "human" or "person"), their two children, Henry and Gladys, and Sabina, who appears as the family's maid in the first and third acts, and as a beauty queen temptress in the second act. The play's action takes place in a modern setting, but is full of anachronisms reaching back to prehistoric times. The characters' roles as archetypes are emphasized by their identification with Biblical and classical personalities:
The name Lilly Sabina is a reference to the myth of Lilith and to the historical rape of the Sabine women, identifications made relatively explicit in the play's text. Henry Antrobus's name was changed from "Cain", following his murder of his brother Abel, mirroring the biblical story in which Adam's son murders his brother after God favors Abel over Cain by gifts. This implies that George Antrobus is Adam and Maggie Antrobus Eve, supported when George composes a song for his wife Maggie in honor of their anniversary: "Happy w'dding ann'vers'ry dear Eva."
The murder of Abel is an underlying theme in the play. Mr. Antrobus pays far more attention to his "perfect" third child Gladys than he does Henry. As this treatment of Henry continues, Henry's anger progresses throughout the play, reaching its climax in the third act.
While the Antrobus family remains constant throughout the play, the three acts do not form a continuous narrative. The first act takes place during an impending ice age; in the second act the family circumstances have changed as George becomes president of the Fraternal Order of Mammals (apparent references to Sodom and Gomorrah but also to the Roaring Twenties), while the end of the world approaches a second time; the third act opens with Maggie and Gladys emerging from a bunker at the end of a seven-year-long war.
An additional layer of stylistic complexity is added by the occasional interruption of the recitative narrative scene by actors directly addressing the audience: In the first scene, the actress playing Sabina reveals her misgivings to the audience about the play; in the second act, she refuses to recite her lines and instead talks to the spectators, which causes a woman in the audience to run from the theater sobbing; and in the third act, the actor playing Mr. Antrobus interrupts to announce that several actors have taken ill and asks the audience to indulge them while the "stage manager" of the play conducts a rehearsal with the replacements.
Act I is an amalgam of early 20th century New Jersey and the dawn of the Ice Age. The father is inventing things such as the lever, the wheel, the alphabet, and multiplication tables. The family and the entire Northeastern U.S. face extinction by a wall of ice moving southward from Canada. The story is introduced by a narrator and further expanded by the family maid, Sabina. There are unsettling parallels between the members of the Antrobus family and various characters from the Bible. In addition, time is compressed and scrambled to such an extent that the refugees who arrive at the Antrobus house seeking food and fire include the Old Testament prophet Moses, the ancient Greek poet Homer, and women who are identified as Muses.