We’re always so narrowly missing total disaster. As a society we don’t seem to notice all that much because of how quickly life moves and how distracted we all are by strange minutia. Best-known for Our Town, Thornton Wilder won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1943 for a look at the tenuous nature of human life in The Skin of Our Teeth. The strange hybrid of a show is patterned after biblical stories that play out much like an early TV/radio sitcom. Here Adam and Eve play out like Ralph and Alice or Lucy and Desi or Fred and Ethel. Here they’re a couple of characters named George and Maggie. They’ve got a couple of kids and a maid, so it feels very classic sitcom until George decides to invent the alphabet and the family goes the the Ice Age, The Great Flood, war and so on. To make matters more complicated, characters are frequently breaking the fourth wall in what has to be one of the strangest popular hits of the ’40s.
The Village Playhouse’s production of The Skin of Our Teeth runs Apr. 1 - 16 at Inspiration Studios on 1500 S. 73rd St. For ticket reservations, visit Brown Paper Tickets online.
