The Skin of Our Teeth
Thornton Wilder
Los Altos Stage Company
Alert! Alert! It’s the coldest day of the year, and it’s only August. An ice wall has moved the Cathedral of Montreal into Vermont; and in Excelsior, New Jersey, dinosaurs and mammoths alike are getting as worried about their survival as are the mounting number of refugees who are heading southward through the brutal cold– refugees like Moses and Homer. And making his way home in the blizzard is Mr. Antrobus, exhausted but exhilarated after a hard day at the office separating M from N in his continuing invention of the alphabet while also discovering ten times ten is one hundred, and – hold your breath – inventing the wheel.
Welcome to the history of the world as told by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Thornton Wilder, whose 1942, modern-set allegory, Skin of Our Teeth, is packed with Biblical and classical archetypes and with anachronisms reaching back to prehistoric times. Its three-acts and near-three hours take us on a wild and often whacky encounter with disaster after disaster that humankind time and again barely escape – just like the biblical Job – by the skin of their teeth.
Los Altos Stage Company mounts an ambitious, creative, and talent-packed Skin of Our Teeth, guaranteed to leave us laughing one moment, scratching our heads in confusion in another, and then making ‘ah-ha’ analogies to our own times – all just as Thornton Wilder probably planned. If at times everything just seems too ridiculous and overdone, that is in itself likely just more of the master playwright’s clever, maybe even devious intentions.
Please continue to Talkin’Broadway for the rest of my review.
Rating: 4 E
The Skin of Our Teeth continues through May 5, 2024, in a two-hour, forty-five-minute production (one intermission, one pause) by Los Altos Stage Company in the Bus Barn Theatre, 97 Hillview, Los Altos, CA. Tickets are available online at https://losaltosstage.org, by phone at 650-941-0551, or in person at the box office Thursday, 3:00 – 6:00 p.m. and one-half hour before performance.
Photo Credit: Los Altos Stage Company
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