The Skin of Our Teeth (13 page)

She goes out.
ANTROBUS
starts laughing softly with exhilaration.

ANTROBUS:

Now I remember what three things always went together when I was able to see things most clearly: three things. Three things:

He points to where
SABINA
has gone out.

The voice of the people in their confusion and their need. And the thought of you and the children and this house. And . . . Maggie! I didn't dare ask you: my books! They haven't been lost, have they?

MRS. ANTROBUS:

No. There are some of them right here. Kind of tattered.

ANTROBUS:

Yes.—Remember, Maggie, we almost lost them once before? And when we finally did collect a few torn copies out of old cellars they ran in everyone's head like a fever. They as good as rebuilt the world.

Pauses, book in hand, and looks up.

Oh, I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for—whether it's a field, or a home, or a country. All I ask is the chance to build new worlds and God has always given us that. And has given us

Opening the book

voices to guide us; and the memory of our mistakes to warn us. Maggie, you and I will remember in peacetime all the resolves that were so clear to us in the days of war. We've come a long ways. We've learned. We're learning. And the steps of our journey are marked for us here.

He stands by the table turning the leaves of a book.

Sometimes out there in the war,—standing all night on a hill—I'd try and remember some of the words in these books. Parts of them and phrases would come back to me. And after a while I used to give names to the hours of the night.

He sits, hunting for a passage in the book.

Nine o'clock I used to call Spinoza. Where is it: “After experience had taught me—”

The back wall has disappeared, revealing the platform.
FRED BAILEY
carrying his numeral has started from left to right.
MRS. ANTROBUS
sits by the table sewing.

BAILEY:

“After experience had taught me that the common occurrences of daily life are vain and futile; and I saw that all the objects of my desire and fear were in themselves nothing good nor bad save insofar as the mind was affected by them; I at length determined to search out whether there was something truly good and communicable to man.”

Almost without break
HESTER
, carrying a large Roman numeral ten, starts crossing the platform.
GLADYS
appears at the kitchen door and moves toward her mother's chair.

HESTER:

“Then tell me, O Critias, how will a man choose the ruler that shall rule over him? Will he not choose a man who has first established order in himself, knowing that any decision that has its spring from anger or pride or vanity can be multiplied a thousand fold in its effects upon the citizens?”

HESTER
disappears and
IVY
, as eleven o'clock starts speaking.

IVY:

“This good estate of the mind possessing its object in energy we call divine. This we mortals have occasionally and it is this energy which is pleasantest and best. But God has it always. It is wonderful in us; but in Him how much more wonderful.”

As
MR. TREMAYNE
starts to speak,
HENRY
appears at the edge of the scene, brooding and unreconciled, but present.

TREMAYNE:

“In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the earth; And the Earth was waste and void; And the darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Lord said let there be light and there was light.”

Sudden black-out and silence, except for the last strokes of the midnight bell. Then just as suddenly the lights go up, and
SABINA
is standing at the window, as at the opening of the play.

SABINA:

Oh, oh, oh. Six o'clock and the master not home yet. Pray God nothing serious has happened to him crossing the Hudson River. But I wouldn't be surprised. The whole world's at sixes and sevens, and why the house hasn't fallen down about our ears long ago is a miracle to me.

She comes down to the footlights.

This is where you came in. We have to go on for ages and ages yet.

You go home.

The end of this play isn't written yet.

Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus! Their heads are full of plans and they're as confident as the first day they began,—and they told me to tell you: good night.

Afterword

 

Overview

Thornton Wilder began writing
The Skin of Our Teeth
(then titled
The Ends of the Worlds
) on June 24, 1940, at the MacDowell Colony, the artists and writers retreat in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where
Our Town
had been born three years earlier. He was searching for a way to bear witness to a world increasingly at war, and he had been inspired, in part, by the way James Joyce had presented “ancient man as an ever-present double to modern man” in
Finnegans Wake.
Wilder coupled this note in his journal entry of July 6, 1940, with these quasi-hopeful words: “During the last year subject after subject presented itself and crumbled away in my hands. Can this one hold out?” Hold out it did, although not without many discouraging and—appropriately for the property—dramatic moments.

During a nearly three-month stay that fall at the Château Frontenac in Quebec, a still deeper retreat from places where people knew him, Wilder completed much of the work on the first two acts. Significantly, he was now living among people who were officially at war. On November 13, he wrote his dramatic agent: “Scarcely dare talk about it; looks to me like the play's prodigious. First two acts done. Not a sight or sound out of me until I return with the finished script, maybe as soon as Dec. 10.”

He did not meet his deadline. On December 14, about to leave Quebec, Wilder wrote Robert Ardrey, a fellow playwright and his former student, “The new play is not finished yet after all. Heigh-ho. I swear I don't know what I've got here. I just keep trying to bring into shape—it a fine idea, but very hard to do.”

In the end, Act III, the war act, which Wilder found the most difficult to write, was not ready for Jed Harris, his director of choice, until January 1, 1942, a year later. Many honorable deeds and distractions came between Wilder and his goal of completing the play, among them a three-month trip on a cultural goodwill mission to Latin America for the Department of State, a summer term teaching a double course load at the University of Chicago, and an autumn trip to London as U.S. delegate to an international PEN conference. This last assignment offered him an opportunity to view actual war damage and to talk with courageous civilians, soldiers, and fighter and bomber pilots in England and Scotland. These encounters helped Wilder to begin to conceive for the end of the play a note about the survival of the human race that would be hopeful but not “trite” or “evasive,” words he used at the time. His search for the right words continued during the play's rehearsal period until, as a last touch, he added George Antrobus's final speech in the play: “We've come a long ways. We've learned. We're learning. . . .”

Several years later, in a 1948 letter to his brother, Amos, Wilder recalled this creative challenge:

 

I've always assumed a very slow curve of civilization. But I always affirm too that my toleration of humanity's failings is more affirmative than most “optimists.” When I first wrote
Skin of Our Teeth
it lacked that motto-humanity-climbing-upward speeches of Mr. Antrobus at the end. I assumed that they were omnipresent in the play and didn't have to be stated. I assumed that they were self-evident,—that's how highly I believed in mankind. But more and more of the early readers found the play “defeatist.” So I wrote in the moral and crossed the t's and i's.

It was Wilder's expectation that Jed Harris, who had produced and directed
Our Town,
would play the same roles for
The Skin of Our Teeth.
Harris turned him down, however. Wilder then offered the producer's role to Michael Myerberg, an entertainment promoter who had worked as Leopold Stokowski's manager. Wilder had known Myerberg casually for about five years, and did not consider his lack of Broadway experience a disadvantage. On the contrary, he made this unusual choice because he had no faith that, with the exception of the legendary Harris, any experienced Broadway producer could do justice to a drama that Wilder predicted to his attorney would “probably involve a complicated history.” He was right.

Exuding just the fresh energy that Wilder was counting on, Myerberg orchestrated a production that included the exciting young director, Elia Kazan, and a galaxy of distinguished actors: Fredric March and Florence Eldridge as Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus; Montgomery Clift and Frances Heflin as Henry and Gladys; Florence Reed as the Fortune Teller; and the already legendary Tallulah Bankhead as Sabina. But almost immediately there were complications. Myerberg's imperiousness, unpredictable moods, and indifference in handling budgets and people combined with Bankhead's volatile temperament to make life unusually hellish for the cast as well as the author and his representatives.

Bad feeling backstage did not at first compromise the quality of the production.
Skin
played to mostly favorable press and many a sold-out house in its four-week, four-city tryout period in New Haven, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Not that people necessarily understood a play that an out-of-town
Variety
story reported “bewilders, bemuses and befuddles while it amuses.” Had the reporter added the word “upsets” to the list, he would have scooped Wilder's own assessment, written to his family soon after rehearsals had begun: “I think it's a very good play, but it's so daringly written as to theatre-mood that it may well puzzle and upset instead of amuse and move.”

And upset it did. As long as there is Broadway lore, it will likely include stories of taxis lining up early to snag the fares of people fleeing
The Skin of Our Teeth
at the end of Act I or II, some even jamming their fists through the play's posters along the way. According to Richard Maney, the play's publicist, fifteen people walked out early at the world premiere in New Haven's Shubert Theater on October 15, 1942. Hoping that knowledge might stem the tide, Myerberg ordered Maney to write a synopsis of the play to insert in the playbill. These words greeted the audience at the second performance:

 

The Skin of Our Teeth
is a comedy about George Antrobus, his wife and two children, and their general utility maid, Lily Sabina, all of Exelsior, New Jersey. George Antrobus is John Doe or George Spelvin or you—the average American at grips with destiny, sometimes sour, sometimes sweet. The Antrobuses have survived fire, flood, pestilence, the seven-year locusts, the ice age, the black pox and the double feature, a dozen wars and as many depressions. They have run many a gamut, are as durable as radiators, and look upon the future with a disarming optimism. Alternately bewitched, befuddled and becalmed, they are the stuff of which heroes are made—heroes and buffoons. They are true offspring of Adam and Eve, victims of all the ills that flesh is heir to. They have survived a thousand calamities by the skin of their teeth, and Mr. Wilder's play is a tribute to their indestructibility.

Out-of-town success is no guarantee of Broadway success, but in the case of
Skin,
which opened on November 18 at the Plymouth Theater in New York, it was. With few exceptions, reviews were strong, some even raves: “A dramatic bombshell”—
Life
; “Theater-going became a rare and electrifying experience”—
New York Herald Tribune
; “Quite sure to prove the supreme novelty of the theater season”—
New York Daily News.
Two especially influential tastemakers put the case this way: “One of the wisest and friskiest comedies written in a long time,” critic Brooks Atkinson wrote in the
New York Times.
Wilder's friend, the critic and commentator Alexander Woollcott, called
The Skin of Our Teeth
“the nearest thing to a great play which the American theater has yet produced.” There were critics on the other side of the fence, of course. As a general comment, they found tricks rather than substance. “[It] dolls up its theme rather than dramatizes it,” said
Time.
“It is too overt, too garish, too sensational in the literal sense,” wrote the
Commonweal
reviewer.

At the end of a theatrical day, the box office never lies. Through the first five months of the run,
The Skin of Our Teeth
rarely earned less than $20,000 a week in ticket sales, all but a sellout. After falling off only a bit (to the $16,000 to $18,000 range) in the normally slower theatrical months of March and April, sales jumped up again when the play was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in May 1943.

Controversy is always good for box office. Consequently, it did not hurt sales when Henry Morton Robinson and Joseph Campbell, students of James Joyce, ignited a firestorm of debate and comment in the press when they accused Wilder in two articles published in
The Saturday Review of Literature
in December 1942 and January 1943, of writing “an Americanized re-creation, thinly disguised,” based on Joyce's
Finnegans Wake.
The accusers never used the word “plagiarism,” but they implied it, and the term appeared in the press. Specious if malicious, the charge was dismissed by authorities at the time and since. Still, it probably cost
The Skin of Our Teeth
the 1943 Drama Critics Award, but not the Pulitzer Prize. At the time, Wilder chose not to respond publicly to the charges, other than to encourage those interested to embark on the daunting task of reading
Finnegans Wake
and deciding for themselves.

Wilder was, in fact, in no position to give serious attention to his accusers even if he had wanted to. Two months before the play went into rehearsal, at age forty-five, he had eagerly entered active duty with Army Air Force Intelligence, turning over the playwright's duties to his agent, his attorney, and his knowledgeable sister, Isabel, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama.

Nevertheless, until the recently promoted Major Wilder departed for overseas duty in North Africa in late May 1943, he found it impossible to avoid all the drama playing out on both sides of the curtain. Through letters, telegrams, occasional visits from various principals, and anguished phone calls, Wilder found himself dragged into the fray surrounding
The Skin of Our Teeth.
He saw the show from beginning to end only twice, once in November just before the New York opening, and again in April 1943.

Had the original cast held on,
Skin
might well have played far longer on Broadway than it did. But by June 1943, backstage tensions had become so intolerable that March, Eldridge, and Bankhead took advantage of clauses in their contracts and left the show. Like a wounded animal,
Skin
(now earning $10,000 or less weekly at the box office) limped through the always difficult summer months with new faces in key roles. As the production had come to depend on Tallulah Bankhead's star power in the role of Sabina, her departure was all but a death blow.

A play as famous and even infamous as
The Skin of Our Teeth
could usually count on a successful post-Broadway national tour, and Myerberg planned this for the fall, starting with a two-week engagement in Boston. The 359-performance Broadway run closed on Saturday, September 25, opened in Boston the following Monday and closed after only the first week. Gladys George, the new Sabina, was now out of the part, claiming throat problems. She was replaced by Elizabeth Scott. The box office was terrible. This “sudden eclipse,” wrote a
Variety
reporter, “was no surprise to those who have followed the vagaries of the show.”

A by-product of
Skin
's early demise was the earlier-than-anticipated release of the amateur and stock rights and the beginning, in 1944, of
Skin
's enduring popularity with high school, college, and community drama groups. Nor has the play faded entirely from the professional stages. Since 1980, it has been produced some twenty times in stock and regional theaters around the country. Major productions since the war have included the 1955 revival starring Mary Martin and Helen Hayes and the 1961 ANTA–American Repertory Company revival. Both productions were sent abroad as part of the State Department's cultural programming. (The 1955
Skin,
directed by Alan Schneider, went to Paris, while the 1961 production played in twenty-four countries in Europe and Latin America.) In 1975, José Quintero directed a production that kicked off the American Bicentennial Theater season project at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington with Elizabeth Ashley as Sabina.
Skin
had its last New York appearance in 1998. The production, by the New York Shakespeare Festival in its Delacorte Theater in Central Park, was directed by Irene Lewis and featured Kristen Johnson as Sabina. In 1945, Laurence Olivier directed the London opening with his wife, Vivien Leigh, as Sabina; no British production is more famous. Finally, not to be forgotten are Wilder's own appearances playing George Antrobus in several summer stock productions after World War II, including such notable “straw hat” addresses as the Berkshire Festival Playhouse in Stockbridge, the South Shore Players in Cohasset, Massachusetts, and the historic Westport Country Playhouse in Westport, Connecticut.

There have been several televised versions of
The Skin of Our Teeth,
including a 1952 Pulitzer Prize Playhouse production on which Wilder himself consulted. None is better remembered today than the Globe Theater's important 1983 PBS “American Playhouse” version. But like a mountain that refuses to be conquered, the play has so far resisted all attempts to be adapted as a major film, opera, or musical. The prospect has attracted the attention of such talents as Leonard Bernstein, Mary Ellen Bute, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy—and most recently, John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Joe Stein. The story of
Skin
in translation is a different matter. Starting with a performance in German in Zurich's renowned Schauspielhaus in the spring of 1944,
The Skin of Our Teeth
has been performed in some twenty languages in more than forty countries. As Wilder noted in his influential preface to
Three Plays
(1957), it had a special resonance in postwar Germany, where the first production occurred in the ruins of Darmstadt on March 31, 1946. By November 1949,
Skin
had been performed in both the Eastern and Western Zones 501 times by fifteen companies in thirty German cities. (By the late 1940s, Wilder's works, including
Skin,
had been banned in the Soviet Union and most Eastern bloc countries, including East Germany, for promoting bourgeois values.) In short,
The Skin of Our Teeth
—so often thought of as especially American because of its eagerness, high jinks, and vision of human capability—is a well-established piece of world theater, although it would also be fair to say that it has been produced less frequently since the end of the Cold War.