The Skin of Our Teeth
Opening Night: April 25, 2022
Theater: Vivian Beaumont
Website: www.lct.org
Thornton Wilder’s 1942 Pulitzer Prize winning play follows the Antrobus family as they confront the challenges of nothing less than the apocalypse, dinosaurs, war, a woolly mammoth, the Ice Age and raising two kids in suburban Excelsior, New Jersey. It is mayhem, sometimes absurd and funny and sometimes deeply moving, but it is always real.
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April 25, 2022
In Blain-Cruz’s maximalist hands, it gets even bigger, the stage overflowing with flowers and lights and dazzling, playful puppetry. She favors a high femme aesthetic — luxuriant, Instagrammable — and no other serious director working now has such a profound interest in visual pleasure and delight. She also has a killer playlist (Rihanna, Dua Lipa). Because this is the way the world ends: all bangers, no skips.
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April 25, 2022
The current Broadway season has offered a few good revivals of plays and a couple of great revivals: Paul Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive” and Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s “Lackawanna Blues.” That winning streak ended on Monday with the opening of “The Skin of Our Teeth” at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont.
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April 25, 2022
The events of the play are chaotic, but in this production they connect to the chaos of the here and now in ways that left me bewildered and a little frazzled. The show jolts from one act to the next with little ease. How do we get from Excelsior, New Jersey to Atlantic City and back?
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April 25, 2022
With a Black cast, loving references to bell hooks and allusions to youthful rage that seem as ferociously essential as the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Blain-Cruz reshapes Wilder’s universe just enough to encompass the Black experience, placing it firmly within the sweep of Wilder’s epoch-spanning tragicomic history of humanity.
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April 25, 2022
While all of that existential meaning and non-meaning can send your brain on a roller-coaster ride — the morning after seeing the show I felt hungover — the exceptionality of this Broadway production makes it well worth the price of admission.
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April 25, 2022
Thanks to Lileana Blain-Cruz’s inspired directorial vision and playwright Brandon Jacob Jenkins’ new material, an already prophetic text turns into something that’s even more palatable to an audience with a 21st-century cultural context.
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April 25, 2022
I’m not sure that any revival of The Skin of Our Teeth can really work anymore. But for theater lovers, this one offers a rare chance to see a Pulitzer Prize–winning curiosity as an all-out extravaganza, with nearly 30 actors—the always superb Roslyn Ruff is a standout—and a vividly imaginative staging.
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April 25, 2022
Yet The Skin of Our Teeth retains an urgency worth paying attention to. A couple of changes have been made from Wilder’s 80-year-old script: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has made modest additions to the text (works of bell hooks and Maya Angelou receive mention) to offset the play’s relevant but musty quotes from the likes of Aristotle and Spinoza. And in an inspired take, Blain-Cruz has cast the Antrobuses as a Black family, which, like other families of color, has survived through the centuries despite the destructive societal forces that have conspired to break it apart.
READ THE REVIEWApril 25, 2022
While this Skin of Our Teeth is sumptuously presented, with three massive sets by Adam Rigg (including an entirely gratuitous but attention-pulling carnival slide in Act II), the spectacle also serves as a crutch and distracts from the urgency in the text.
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April 25, 2022
We know that patriarchy, greed, and white supremacy have spawned misery across ages; without pretending they have the solution, theater artists can find deep bass strings of commonality to pluck. For me, The Skin of Our Teeth is a boisterous hymn to humanity, the most moving and inspiring work of the season.
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April 25, 2022
Within ten minutes of Lincoln Center’s massive, exhilarating production of Wilder’s sweeping epic, which opens tonight, it is immediately clear why Blain-Cruz chose this play, in this theater, right now.
READ THE REVIEWApril 25, 2022
And there you have the problem with Lileana Blain-Cruz’s epic Lincoln Center revival, an admirably imaginative treatment of the play that alas does much too little to find a way in for its audience.
READ THE REVIEWApril 25, 2022
Up at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, designer Adam Rigg’s spectacular scenery for the revival is as mammoth as the woolly mammoth that stomps around the characters’ living room along with an adorable brachiosaurus. The supersize environs liven up a 1942 comedy that, at over three hours long, can feel rather prehistoric itself.
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