The Skin of Our Teeth

The Skin of Our Teeth is American playwright Thornton Wilder’s satirical tribute to the indestructibility of the American nuclear family and its dogged determination to survive. Written in 1942, largely in response to U.S. involvement in WWII, Wilder’s play was meant partly to assuage our fears of worldwide destruction brought on by war. The main characters are a 20th-century nuclear family–Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus, their son and daughter, and the maid Sabina–but Wilder takes them through such events as the Ice Age, biblical times, the invention of the wheel, ancient Greece, the Great War, even a beauty pageant in Atlantic City. Their experiences represent the range of human potential–for genius, love, envy, betrayal, destruction, and, most importantly, for survival. Wilder masterfully looks ahead to the future of the human race while at the same time compounding its entire history into three acts. The epic heroes found in the seemingly average Antrobus family know all about rebuilding and continuing life in the face of adversity. They are proof of the age-old words that could easily be turned into a slogan for the 21st century: “Living is struggle.”