The Skin of Our Teeth

by Thornton Wilder

  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.

  The experimental techniques Wilder employed in 1942—the anachronisms, the asides, the interruptions—are now familiar to a twenty-first-century audience raised on modern theater and the television sitcom. And contemporary critics have squirmed in their seats at Wilder’s proclamations about patriotism and loyalty and what one admirer of the play in 1975 summarized as a perceived tendency toward “excessively abstract, dreamy allegory, populated by stock characters of popular cliché.” Have the novelty of the play and its whimsy grown thin for some theatergoers? Perhaps. But what the record also shows is that because of its theatricality and humor, and the sheer craziness of exploring and producing what is known in the business as a “theatrical bible,” The Skin of Our Teeth continues to attract and to hold the attention of actors, audiences, playwrights, and students today, more than sixty years after it opened on Broadway.

  —Tappan Wilder

  Chevy Chase, Maryland

  Readings

  During the Writing of the Play

  A Letter

  Wilder writes a newsy letter, from which this excerpt is taken, to his family from the Château Frontenac.

  Sunday, Oct. 20, 1940, 11:10 P.M.

  Chateau Frontenac

  Quebec, P.Q.

  Dear Ones:

  The first snow. And a surprise. I’d just—but I’d better tell you the whole afternoon.

  After lunch, it being a fine day I thought I’d get out the car, just to keep my hand in. So I drove all around the Ile d’Orleans, the farms pretty well modernized, but great views of the great river and many yellow-ochre forests. Then I drove to the Falls of Montmorency—one hundred feet higher than Niagara, and a very fine sight. (Coleridge—I think it’s Coleridge—“uses” them in a poem in that “Spirit of Man” anthology on your table there.) The water hurtles down creating a wide diversity
of effects in lace and mist and rainbows and parsley-sprays and gossamer ladders and climbing serpents. And I had tea at a very nice hotel beside it, now unfortunately closed to residence, called Kent House, because it was the summer house of the Duke of Kent, Father of Queen Victoria, then Governor-General of New France.

  Then I got home and went to church to Vespers at St. Matthew’s, which on All Soul’s Day—November first, as all readers of Finnegans Wake must know well—will celebrate its mere 150th anniversary, which must arouse a scornful laugh from the Roman Catholic churches, all fifty of them, nearby. Half the congregation was in uniform, and we prayed for the Royal Family, and sang “God Save the King,” and the Rector cast some of those condescending bathetic references to our dear boys in the service which would make a conscientious objector out of a Theodore Roosevelt.

  Then I stopped for something to eat in town, knowing the worst, for the food in this city is so dreadful that when I eat anywhere except in this hotel I am indubitably poisoned and belch darkly throughout the night. Then I came home to couch on paper the new suggestions for Act Two that had arrived to me during Vespers—your church-going being a lively incentive to your playwriting, though the point-de-départ is left far behind. On my door I found word that a special delivery was waiting for me below. It seemed impossible that you could have already received and replied To my Special, and yet you’re the only correspondent whom I told my address. I thought I had turned in for the night, but just before I went below to claim the letter I looked out of the window at my now cherished view and saw Everything Covered with Snow. Well, the first snow of the year is one of my fêtes, and I had always felt that Quebec, like Litchfield, and Oxford, and, I assume, Prague, mutely waits for snow. So I put on my overshoes—packed, remember? at the last moment, and have taken another walk. . . .

  A Journal Entry

  Wilder writes in his journal about the problems he continues to face in completing Act III, in which he wished to employ a device he first used in his one-act play Pullman Car Hiawatha in 1931. He wrote this entry on December 2, 1941, while visiting Alexander Woollcott’s retreat on Neshobe Island in Vermont.

  Again bogged down and frightened. Last month in New Haven not only did I tighten up Acts One and Two—I think I can say that with the exception of a short passage in Act Two they are finished, and good—but I wrote a “through” Third Act; but it is not right.

  The employment of the “Pullman Car Hiawatha” material [in Pullman Car Hiawatha, published in the volume The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act (1931), minutes appear as gossips, hours as philosophers, and years as theologians] is (1) Dragged in indigestibly; (2) Insufficiently related to the surrounding material; (3) An incorrect statement of the central intention of the Act—is that intention, by the way, to be “save the cultural tradition?”—and (4) It smacks of the faux-sublime.

  To go back to first principles: what does one offer the audience as explanation of man’s endurance, aim, and consolation? Hitherto, I had planned here to say that the existence of his children and the inventive activity of his mind keep urging him to continued and better-adjusted survival. In the Third Act I was planning to say that the ideas contained in the great books of his predecessors hang above him in mid-air furnishing him adequate direction and stimulation.

  (1) Do I believe this?

  (2) Have I found the correct theatrical statement for it?

  (3) Is it sufficient climax for the play?

  Taking these in turn: (1) I do believe it. I think the only trouble with it is that there is the point where the vast majority of writers hitherto would have planted the religious note. It’s not so much that I deny that religious note as that it presents itself to me only intermittently and in terms too individualistic to enter the framework of this place.

  (2) The statement that the ideas and books of the masters are the motive forces for man’s progress is a difficult one to represent theatrically. The drawbacks against the “Pullman Car Hiawatha” treatment are that (a) the Hours-as-Philosophers runs the danger of being a cute fantasy and not a living striking metaphor, and (b) . . . I cannot find citations from the philosophers’ works that briefly and succinctly express what I need here.

  At all events, I have begun work as usual by excision. Out go the “people who had died in the house”—we have had enough of the common men who preceded our Antrobuses. Out also goes, I think, the natural history, though maybe that might be useful, not as giving the arch of the natural world that surrounds us, but as making more easy the identification of Stars and Hours with Philosophers and Artists. Out go the allusions to the various calendars—partly because it is so difficult to choose one day to cite. Into the earlier part of the Act should go, if I can keep Hours-Philosophers, much more reference to Mr. Antrobus’s books.

  Couldn’t the quarrel between Henry and his father hang on Henry’s contempt for the books that had led his father astray?

  A Country at War

  After returning from a monthlong trip to England in the fall of 1941, which took him from London to Bristol and Glasgow, Wilder spoke of his impressions on NBC Radio and wrote them in an article entitled “After a Visit to England” in The Yale Review, from which this excerpt is taken.

  At times I felt like some passerby who has strayed by accident upon a stage where a play is in progress. Each of the highly dramatic episodes of the action was clear to me, but seemed to be misunderstood by the performers. Suddenly, however, I realized that I was a late arrival; that earlier in the play there had been a scene exhibiting these characters in some situation of a gravity so profound that there was no need to allude to it afterward; that allusion could only be inadequate, so it could only be disruptive. Back had flowed the spirit of the daily life, and only with close attention could the newcomer surprise some exchange between them of glance or gesture that recalled the vows they had taken and the agony they had shared. . . .

  To overemphasize a few of such difficulties—common enough to other countries even when there is no confusion of crisis to complicate them—would be an injustice to the total magnificent achievement of civilian defense in Britain under the unheard-of conditions of the air raids. Yet to pass them over in silence would be to overlook an important new element in current attitudes. The principal thing in the mental temper of Britain is the unity and resolution exemplified in the self-imposed restraint and the co-operation of all citizens in the emergency. In a factory which produces certain delicate instruments for airplanes the workers had denied themselves three week-ends off in succession. Great was the anticipation for the recess finally accorded them. On the Friday before it they were called together at the noon hour and addressed by two air pilots each of whom had made over thirty flights into enemy territory. The airmen explained to them the urgency of the demand for the several hundred instruments that would be lost through the closing of the factory and asked them to remain at their tasks. The workers remained. On an historic estate in Sussex, a lady from Mayfair had herself milked the cow, churned the butter, and, with the help of one friend, cooked the dinner for six.

  The enemy had first shown what a total war can be—every citizen bent to an activity directed against every citizen in the enemy country. Britain is making it clear that what the Germans have effected, first with rhetorical oratory, and finally with threats and coercion, a democracy can achieve with composure and free will.

  Seeing His Play

  After seeing Skin in November 1942, shortly before it opened in New York, Wilder, now an Air Force Intelligence officer, sent notes, through his dramatic agent, Harold Freedman, on the performance to Michael Myerberg (producer), Elia (“Gadgett”) Kazan (director), and his sister, Isabel (his representative). His report, from which this excerpt is taken, was mailed from Spokane, Washington, November 24, 1942.

  Notes on the performance of The Skin of Our Teeth, (Harold, will you ask a secretary to type these out and provide copies for Michael, Gadgett and my sister, as I cannot take the time to writ
e them separately.)

  First place,—many thanks to all concerned for all the fine things about the performance. The following is a list of passages that I feel would be bettered, but that doesn’t mean that I am not overwhelmingly grateful for what is already there.

  For me the only real flaw in the present production is the hurry-hurry-hurry. The lack of variation in pace, in the First Act, from the time of Mr. Antrobus’s entrance. This uniform onward rush prevents both the serious aspect of the play emerging (so necessary as preparation for the change of tone in Act III) and prevents a real sense of excitement in the possibility of danger before the oncoming ice.

  Examples: The monotonous busy-busyness of the stage pace prevents any attention being given to Mrs. Antrobus’ “No, they’ve been as good as gold—haven’t had to raise my voice once”; to the interchange between Mr. and Mrs. A while he is playing with the animals. (Keep that mammoth quiet in many places,—he’s the kind that will get worse and worse.) That conversation should have ominous weight, real pauses, and much violence at its climax—“The Sun’s growing cold. What can I do about that?”

  Also give Mr. A. a real moment with his—“Yes, any booby can play it with it now, etc.” inward, withdrawn, brooding.