Thornton Wilder's The Skin of our Teeth

Kyle Gillette

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317288725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm not going to play this particular scene tonight." - Sabina

Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) telescopes an audacious stretch of western history and mythology into a family drama, showing how the course of human events operates like theatre itself: constantly mutable, vanishing and beginning again.

Kyle Gillette explores Wilder's extraordinary play in three parts. Part I unpacks the play's singular yet deeply interconnected place in theatre history, comparing its metatheatrics to those of Stein, Pirandello and Brecht, and finding its anticipation of American fantasias in the works of Vogel and Kushner. Part II turns to the play's many historic and mythic sources, and examines its concentration of western progress and power into the model of a white, American upper-middle-class nuclear family. Part III takes a longer view, tangling with the play's philosophical stakes.

Gillette magnifies the play's ideas and connections, teasing out historical, theoretical and philosophical questions on behalf of readers, scholars and audience members alike.

Part I

Metatheatre

1

Metatheatre and failure

As soon as a projected slide show begins the play with ‘NEWS EVENTS OF THE WORLD’, The Skin of Our Teeth announces its reality as split. The announcer situates the action we are about to see as part of a storytelling kind of theatre quite different from the domestic realism, lighthearted comedy or Broadway musical dominant in 1942 American theatre. Sabina the maid begins the first scene with an introduction to the characters and milieu of the Antrobus household. She dusts while telling us about the family, revealing its secrets and establishing a direct relationship with the audience (long before the actress playing her, Miss Somerset, first interrupts to tell us what she really thinks about the play).

From the start, the Antrobus house is beset by theatrical malfunctions. As Sabina begins, a ‘fragment of the right wall leans precariously over the stage. SABINA looks at it nervously and it slowly rights itself.’ A few lines later it ‘flies up into the lofts. SABINA is struck dumb with surprise.’ These early technical failures compound when Mrs Antrobus misses her cue. Sabina says the cue line again: ‘Don’t forget that a few years ago we came through the depression by The Skin of Our Teeth. One more tight squeeze like that and where will we be?’. Finally, the stage manager Mr Fitzpatrick has no choice but to tell Miss Somerset to ‘Make up something!’. But Miss Somerset is not that kind of actress. She is not comfortable with improvisation and has little regard for the play: ‘I can’t invent any words for this play, and I’m glad I can’t. I hate this play and every word in it.’ She finds it perplexing and baulks at its scope: ‘As for me, I don’t understand a single word of it, anyway, – all about the troubles the human race has gone through, there’s a subject for you.’

Miss Somerset has a special impatience for the play’s central conceit of collapsing ordinary modern people with ancient sources: ‘Besides, the author hasn’t made up his silly mind as to whether we’re all living back in caves or in New Jersey today, and that’s the way it is all the way through.’ Mrs Antrobus finally enters (late) and asks Sabina if she has milked the mammoth. ‘I don’t understand a word of this play. Yes, I’ve milked the mammoth.’ When Sabina later has to denigrate Judge Moses with ‘The Ten Commandments – FAUGH!!!’, Miss Somerset says, ‘That’s the worst line I’ve ever had to say on any stage.’ But through her confusion, she also allows the audience to see the play through her eyes as she gives signposts of discovery: ‘Now that you audience are listening to this, too, I understand it a little better.’ Still, the sense of being trapped remains in the sheer fact of repetition inherent in theatre: ‘I wish eleven o’clock were here; I don’t want to be dragged through this whole play again.’

Miss Somerset has a sense of personal decorum that contrasts sharply with the actions of Sabina and the stakes of the play. She dislikes both dark realism and the play’s encyclopedic pastiche; she pines for traditional plays with romantic love stories. Her generally bourgeois and philistine tastes throw the play’s darker themes into sharp relief and guide us through them. When she does understand elements of Wilder’s play (for the first time in its presumably long run) she objects to its representations of abjection or suffering. When Moses, Homer, the Muses, Socrates and Hippocrates seek shelter in the Antrobus home against the oncoming ice age, Miss Somerset suddenly ‘drops the play’ midline and, scandalized, crosses to the proscenium. ‘Oh, I see what this part of the play means now! This means refugees.’ Leaning against the proscenium arch, she ‘bursts into tears’ and says ‘Oh, I don’t like it. I don’t like it.’ She tries to assuage whatever guilty discomfort the audience may have too:

Ladies and gentlemen! Don’t take this play serious. The world’s not coming to an end. You know it’s not. People exaggerate! Most people really have enough to eat and a roof over their heads. Nobody actually starves – you can always eat grass or something. That ice-business – why, it was a long, long time ago. Besides they were only savages. Savages don’t love their families – not like we do.

As the USA entered the Second World War, with horrific news pouring in from Europe and Asia along with evidence of genocide on an unprecedented scale, American audiences were all too unsettled by the NEWS EVENTS OF THE WORLD and had to choose to look or look away. Pearl Harbor ended war-weary isolationism with a reminder that the USA was vulnerable too. Miss Somerset of course only emphasizes how much we ought to care by telling us we do not have to take the play seriously. She asks us to distance ourselves from the suffering of others because of their difference. We should not have to suffer the encounter with their suffering; they are not wholly human; they are alien; they are long ago or far away or just not us. By glibly articulating her stance (‘you can always eat grass or something’), Miss Somerset only reinforces how continuously relevant the suffering of others, even the suffering of the past, must be to our present. When the stage manager and the actor playing Mr Antrobus insist that she continues the scene, she capitulates but establishes the intellectual stakes via negativa: ‘All right. I’ll say the lines but I won’t think about the play.’ Then, to us: ‘And I advise you not to think about the play either.’ Of course we do even more because she says not to. Perhaps the sense of a philistine ally makes the play’s representations easier to stomach too.

Yet Miss Somerset’s tears seem to come from a deeply humane (if deeply repressed) place. She does weep for the suffering of others; she just wishes she did not have to. She presumes that we may be similarly affected and wants to shield us from the suffering as she might shield children from having their innocence spoiled by the sight of death or sickness. The metatheatrical layer of the play, then, is infused with affect, not intellectual distancing. Rather than pushing us further away to reflect in objective distance, as Brecht’s theatre did through many similar metatheatrical effects, Wilder’s metatheatre draws us closer, makes us part of the action. We share in the struggle not only through identification or empathy; we have to help.

The characters’ cataclysms leak down from the boards and into the auditorium. As the fire threatens to go out at the end of the first act, plunging the characters into the extinctions of the ice age, the family and refugees burn furniture to keep the fire going. Sabina asks that we help too, coming down to the footlights and addressing us directly: ‘Will you please start handing up your chairs? We’ll need everything for this fire. Save the human race. – Ushers, will you pass the chairs up here?’. They do: ‘In the back of the auditorium the sound of chairs being ripped up can be heard. USHERS rush down the aisles with chairs and hand them over.’ The effect is thrilling, not just bringing the play into the auditorium but also the auditorium onto the stage and into the play. We see the very apparatus of theatre as our common human structure, one that must be united materially and psychically to continue existence. We must be ready to lose our seats to save the family. We must be ready to lose ourselves to history.

Miss Somerset, though, cautions against too much suffering in the theatre. She is not only averse to representing suffering; she is averse to representations that may cause suffering. In Act II, she interrupts not because she is too prudish to play out a scandalous love scene but because she does not want it to hurt one particular friend in the audience. When her character seduces the newly elected President George Antrobus on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, Miss Somerset insists on narrating rather than acting out the scene:

Just a moment. I have something I wish to say to the audience. – Ladies and gentlemen. I’m not going to play this particular scene tonight. It’s just a short scene and we’re going to skip it. But I’ll tell you what takes place and then we can continue the play from there on. Now, in this scene –

Naturally, the stage manager and her fellow actors grow angry with her. She is undeterred: ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But I have to skip it. In this scene I talk to Mr. Antrobus, and at the end of it he decides to leave his wife, get a divorce at Reno and marry me. That’s all.’ The stage manager insists she play the scene, but she says, ‘there are some lines in that scene that would hurt some people’s feelings and I don’t think the theatre is a place where people’s feelings ought to be hurt.’ Her philistinism at least has heart:

Well, if you must know, I have a personal guest in the audience tonight. Her life hasn’t been exactly a happy one. I wouldn’t have my friend hear some of these lines for the whole world. I don’t suppose it occurred to the author that some other women might have gone through the experience of losing their husbands like this. Wild horses wouldn’t drag from me the details of my friend’s life, but . . . well, they’d been married twenty years, and before he got rich, why, she’d done the washing and everything.

Miss Somerset’s comic failure of discretion would presumably hurt her friend more than a fictional representation, but there is something subversively affecting about it too. If the bourgeois theatre is a place to remain safe from traumatic personal memories and reminders of other people’s suffering, Miss Somerset’s antagonistic, rebellious and often mischievous interjections hardly offer an easier alternative. Instead of partaking in the sexual intrigue so common to Broadway spectacles, or the love scenes that manipulate our emotions and draw us into melodramatic theatrical pleasure, Miss Somerset interrupts the apparatus, refuses to perform this aspect of theatre and makes us step back. These interjections are the play’s single most potent way of making direct contact with the audience. Miss Somerset is a thoughtful (though often wrongheaded) and compassionate (though sometimes harmful) subject coming to terms with theatre’s representations and her ethical role as a performer. She actively seeks to save and shelter even as she reveals her anti-intellectual, anti-cultural methods as deeply flawed (and all too ubiquitous in mainstream commercial theatre).

Yet she is frequently necessary to prevent the play’s dangerous excesses. Miss Somerset reins in the perils of the real. She most effectively intervenes to prevent physical harm to the actors. In Act III, George Antrobus returns home from the devastating seven-year war to confront his enemy son Henry. As they argue and then begin stage combat, they get carried away. In particular, the actor playing Henry goes too far. Miss Somerset, along with the actress playing Maggie Antrobus, runs on stage. ‘Stop! Stop! Don’t play this scene. You know what happened last night. Stop the play.’ She reminds the actor playing Henry that he almost strangled the actor playing George at the last performance. Instead of urging her to let the action continue, the actor playing Henry reveals the source of violence and emptiness that may have led to such an inappropriate level of realism:

I’m sorry. I don’t know what comes over me. I have nothing against him personally. I respect him very much . . . I . . . I admire him. But something comes over me. It’s like I become fifteen years old again. I . . . I . . . listen: my own father used to whip me and lock me up every Saturday night. I never had enough to eat. He never let me have enough money to buy decent clothes. I was ashamed to go downtown.

This actor describes a void, a traumatic emptiness in him that replays like trauma in a scene that cuts so close to the bone. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘it’s as though you have to kill somebody else so as not to end up killing yourself.’ The actor playing his father admits a related emptiness:

Wait a minute. I have something to say, too. It’s not wholly his fault that he wants to strangle me in this scene. It’s my fault, too. He wouldn’t feel that way unless there were something in me that reminded him of all that. He talks about an emptiness. Well, there’s an emptiness in me, too. Yes, – work, work, work, – that’s all I do. I’ve ceased to live. No wonder he feels that anger coming over him.

The actress who plays Maggie confirms: yes, the actor who plays George is indeed empty and a workaholic. But Miss Somerset denies the story from the actor who plays Henry. She says she knows his father and he was perfectly nice. Even as she denies the actor’s subjective reality and memories, she somehow teases out a healing encounter by allowing the two men to see their mutual projections. She diffuses physical violence by getting them to talk about their feelings – but not just their emotional states: their animating forces, their acting out of behaviours they do not choose or understand. She allows the audience to see, through the act of acting, how profoundly and invisibly shaped all behaviour is by the past.

The play’s most powerful failure to represent, even to go on, comes not from Miss Somerset demurring to portray or cause pain but instead from an incidence of ‘real’ abjection among the performers. Borrowing from his 1932 one-act play Pullman Car Hiawatha, Wilder stages (or ‘tries’ to stage) a procession that will gesture toward the literary and philosophical heritage of western civilization as well as the cosmos. This time it is not Miss Somerset who interrupts but the stage manager: ‘Miss Somerset! We have to stop a moment.’ He calls for ‘Lights, please’, and asks the actor playing Mr Antrobus to explain. It turns out that several performers needed for this spectacle got food poisoning and, as Miss Somerset says, are ‘having their stomachs pumped out this very minute, in perfect agony’ at Bellevue Hospital. The actor playing George explains how the show will proceed without them:

Naturally we haven’t enough understudies to fill all those roles; but we do have a number of splendid volunteers who have kindly consented to help us out. These friends have watched our rehearsals, and they assure me that they know the lines and the business very well. Let me introduce them to you – my dresser, Mr. Tremayne, – himself a distinguished Shakespearean actor for many years; our wardrobe mistress, Hester; Miss Somerset’s maid, Ivy; and Fred Bailey, captain of the ushers in this theatre.

These surrogates rehearse the procession that we will see again at the end of the play, but their version is necessarily compromised. They allow the audience to stay during the rehearsal but also suggest that we can leave, smoke or talk among ourselves....