Then & Now: 1941 Shubert handbill (left), today’s Yale Rep flyer.
When Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth opened at the Shubert in 1941, cabbies lined up outside at 9 p.m., an hour into the show, to catch the fares fleeing the theater. Though well-received critically — it won the Pulitzer — Wilder’s experimental play, which toys with expressionism and creates a palimpsest of different times and places, asked a bit too much of its initial audience.
On Oct. 20, we have a chance to learn whether audiences have caught up.
A version of the play is opening that night and runs through Oct. 24 around the corner from its Shubert launching pad, at the Yale Repertory Theatre on Chapel Street.
That theatergoers in 1941 had trouble with The Skin of Our Teeth shouldn’t be surprising, even now. Wilder was an avid reader of the works of James Joyce, and was trying to adapt lessons learned from his modernist master to the theater. In following a nuclear family, the Antrobuses, through the history of mankind, Wilder’s play takes its inspiration from Finnegans Wake, one of the most notoriously “unreadable” books in the literary canon.
Luke Harlan, who is directing Wilder’s play as his thesis show for the Yale School of Drama, came to the play through Our Town. A great admirer of Wilder’s much more popular and better-known play, Harlan picked up The Skin of Our Teeth out of curiosity in his undergrad days. It struck him as “the weirdest play” he’d ever read and he didn’t have a very clear idea of what was going on. Parts of the play stuck with him, however: a beach in New Jersey and deck chairs, dinosaurs, a wall falling down. Years later, reading through some of the usual suspects of modernist drama — Bertolt Brecht and Luigi Pirandello — in search of a show for his thesis, Harlan recalled Wilder’s unconventional play.
“I was looking for something challenging, something epic,” Harlan said, a work that would align with “things that are keeping me up at night.” A play, in other words, that says something meaningful about humanity “in a time of crisis.” Written as World War II was underway but before Pearl Harbor, The Skin of Our Teeth debuted after the United States entered the war. The play looks at the challenges facing mankind through the ages, and, even before the atom bomb dropped, considers the possibility of a global apocalypse. With its imagery derived from the biblical Flood, Wilder’s play, Harlan said, is relevant to current anxieties about climate change and “maybe even prescient.”
Harlan was “extremely interested in staging the play,” after reading it again, he said, and it “went to the top of the list” once he started considering the tie-ins. The play opened at the Shubert; Wilder was a Yalie living on Deepwood Drive in Hamden, and a regular — as many Yale grad students were until its recent closing — at the Anchor Bar across from the Shubert. He even lived above the bar for a time. Wilder’s papers, including the manuscript for the play, are in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Wilder volunteered for World War II at the age of 45 and was serving in North Africa and Italy when his play ran, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Tallulah Bankhead as Sabine, the sexy housekeeper. Wilder’s sister Isabelle kept her brother apprised of the often tempestuous proceedings as the director and star sparred over his material. The letters in the Beinecke helped Harlan gain insight into the original production, including a key change to the play’s last line.
David Clauson, the show’s dramaturg, explained a bit more about the “condition of crisis”: For Wilder, writing as the world was going to war, it was hard to see what the future might entail. After the war, the play was very successful in Germany. Staged by Brecht himself, “the play became a political football in Berlin” and was prohibited in East Germany. The reason was “its decadence” in failing to project a socialist future “from the rubble of the war.”
Harlan.
Harlan (pictured) calls the play “uniquely American” in exploring the archetype of what might be called the Everyfamily. Though as Clauson pointed out, it’s a play about a “family connected to everything” rather than a drama centered on a small family, as is far more common in American theater.
Harlan is excited to have use of the Yale Repertory building on Chapel Street. He saw Robert Woodruff’s In the Year of 13 Moons there as a prospective student at the Drama School. He also appreciates that the building used to be a church; Harlan, who was raised Southern Baptist, attended church five times a week growing up. He’s interested in the religious overtones of the play, which includes elements of the Cain and Abel story, asks questions of faith and forgiveness, and takes its title from the Book of Job: “I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.”
So: a lesser known and challenging play by a literary figure of local and national interest. Good. But then there’s also the fact that the play has been ill-served by the productions Harlan learned about, beginning with that first production and the many cuts to the material. Harlan said that from a tape he saw, a more recent production in Central Park stuck to the surface of the play, treating it “as a conventional romp.”
Could it be that Harlan and company might manage a definitive version?
“Nothing like putting pressure on me,” Harlan said with a laugh. He is directing a large cast of 15 actors and will also be onstage at some point as “the director,” called in when things start going wrong with the play — which is part of what had its original audience walking out.
What if history repeats itself?
“I would love to affect an audience so strongly they can’t stay in their seats,” Harlan said.
If that sounds like a challenge to you as an audience member, fine. But first, be sure to get a seat.
An over-the-top production of a play that I'd say doesn't need that treatment--but very well executed, very entertaining, and certainly worth seeing.