New Play in Manhattan

The Skin of Our Teeth (by Thornton Wilder; produced by Michael Myerberg). In Our Town Thornton Wilder abolished space and expanded Main Street into the universe. In The Skin of Our Teeth he has annihilated time and turned the Antrobus family of Excelsior, N.J. into the story of mankind. But where Our Town, despite its reckless stagecraft, was a warm and human allegory nourished with cracker-barrel wisdom, The Skin of Our Teeth is a cockeyed and impudent vaudeville littered with asides and swarming with premeditated anachronisms. Dinosaurs collide with bingo; the Muses jostle the microphone.

Playwright Wilder is equally cavalier about the eternal verities. The Skin of Our Teeth is like a philosophy class conducted in a monkey house. In showing how man through the ages has escaped destruction by the skin of his teeth, the play tweaks his nose, barks his shins, musses his hair, gives him the hotfoot. It tweaks its own nose too: the philosopher implies he may be a monkey himself.

The characters are humanity's archetypes. Mr. & Mrs. Antrobus (Fredric March & Florence Eldridge) are the eternal Mr. & Mrs.; their maid Sabina (Tallulah Bankhead) is Lilith, the eternal floozy; their son Henry (Montgomery Clift) is Cain, the eternal Dead-End kid. Their story is the eternal struggle between good & evil, the eternal seesaw of progressing and falling back. Mr. Antrobus comes home excitedly from the office, having invented the wheel and fixed up the alphabet--but the Ice Age has arrived. Next he swaggers fatuously about Atlantic City, backslapping his lodge brothers and falling for a bathing beauty--but the Flood has arrived. Finally he comes home, exhausted, from war--where Henry has been a little Hitler and Sabina a dusty camp follower--to another battered world. "This is where you came in," Sabina tells the audience. "We have to go on for ages & ages yet. You all 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."

Already a center of controversy, Wilder's jumbled resume of man's history should mystify only those who worry their heads over hidden meanings instead of adjusting their imaginations to spectacular stagecraft. Perfectly clear, too, is Wilder's optimistic conclusion that mankind, for all its bad luck and narrow escapes, is indestructible.

Provocative, unusual, but often unsatisfying, The Skin of Our Teeth dolls up its theme rather than dramatizes it. The fourth dimension somehow stays apart from the other three. Hocus-pocus and moral never quite blend. But the hocus-pocus--with superbly vivacious Actress Bankhead handing most of it out--is often extremely funny. "I hate this play," she suddenly confides. "That's the worst line I've ever had to say on any stage," she complains wearily; but she never spoke one better.

Baldish, bespectacled, 45-year-old Thornton Niven Wilder made news many times before last week. In 1927 he bounced to fame with his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which sold over 250,000 copies and won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1935 his novel Heaven's My Destination, which he described as "diluted Dante," was a Book-of-the-Month choice and a subject for heated discussion. Then & there forswearing fiction for the theater, he emerged in 1938 with Our Town, whose sceneryless stage flabbergasted Broadway, fetched another Pulitzer Prize.

Born in Madison, Wis. of a New England family, Wilder grew up in China (his father was U.S. Consul General at Hong Kong and Shanghai) and California. Even at Yale, from which he graduated in 1920, Wilder gave promise of being one of the coming U.S. literary lights, attracted the favorable attention of William Lyon Phelps and other pundits. A scholarly bachelor with a high, nervous voice, who knows half a dozen languages, speaks in a stumbling rush when excited, he went on teaching at Lawrenceville School and the University of Chicago long after he became famous. Most traditional and cloistered of novelists, he suddenly turned a somersault, became the most adventurous of playwrights. He much prefers plays to novels because of their "absence of editorial comment." He admires Authors Ernest Hemingway, Glenway Wescott, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, the late great Marcel Proust, James Joyce, can recite word for word whole pages of Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

A captain in Air Forces Intelligence since last June, Wilder got his first stage look at The Skin of Our Teeth at a preview two days before it opened.

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