"The Skin of Our Teeth"

July 5, 2018 — This play delightfully breaks all the rules, from actors addressing the audience directly, to expressing reluctance to even being in the play, and lamenting the fact they don't understand the play (neither does the audience at times). At one point, an audience member runs noisily from the theater. Was this part of the play? At the first of two intermissions, the audience sat motionless for several minutes, unsure whether this was really an intermission or another trick of this unpredictable play.

Written by Thornton Wilder and first performed in 1942 at the outbreak of World War II, "The Skin of Our Teeth" won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. This production at the Peterborough Players in Peterborough, New Hampshire, was directed by Players artistic director Gus Kaikkonen. Charles Morgan's always excellent scenic design provided the clever trickery this play's scenery required, and Lisa Steett-Liebetrau designed a stunning number of costumes for the huge cast.

The play is grounded, more or less, by two of the Players' finest actors, Jack Koenig as George Antrobus, and Dee Nelson as George's wife, Maggie. Tess Borsecnik and K Cody Hunt are their children, Gladys and Henry. But for me the real star was Rebecca Brinkley as the maid, Sabina, in Acts 1 and 3, and Sabina in the person of a beauty queen in Act 2. The energetic Kraig Swartz, just off his stint in a one-man show as Truman Capote, has a smaller but not insignificant role in colorful gypsy drag as a fortune teller.

In Act 1, Sabina, in her brief maid's uniform, dusting the furniture in George and Maggie's modern Excelsior, New Jersey home, lays out the characters' roles in her monologue. George has invented the wheel, alphabet and multiplication tables. An encroaching ice age is threatening to wipe out life on earth. In Act 2, the world has survived the ice age, and George has been elected president of an order of mammals. Sabina appears as a beauty queen intent on separating George from his family. But all this becomes unimportant as the world is now threatened with a biblical flood.

Finally, in Act 3, the world has survived a devastating war. Sabina is now in a sort of military uniform and packing a pistol. Maggie and Gladys emerge from a bomb shelter. Gladys is holding a  baby. Their home is in ruins. George and Henry appear. George and Maggie have now been married 5,000 years. George feels defeated. He can't save the world by the skin of his teeth another time. He has a violent fallout with his son, Henry.

There's much more to this play than I've described here. There are backstories. Henry was originally named Cain. He had killed his brother, George's favorite son. This complex play with its cast of over thirty was a remarkable achievement for the Players.

I won't give away the ending. There is no ending. It comes around full circle, like James Joyce's Finnegans Wake which the play has been compared to. Sabina, back in George and Maggie's apartment in her maid's uniform, dusting the furniture, will tell the audience when they may go home.