When The Skin of Our Teeth first appeared in 1942, Wilder deservedly won a Pulitzer Prize for a play that stepped into what is pretentiously called the 'epistemological dimension', that area where are made to challenge our own unspoken assumptions and conventions for viewing and interpreting theatre. Did we believe, he asked, that what happens onstage must duplicate the everyday tangible world, that the proscenium arch is a keyhole through which we peep and overhear real people? Simultaneous to these queries Wilder offered in the comic allegory of one American family the past history, present peril and future redemption of human civilisation from ignorance, hedonism and holocaust. A tall order for comedy, especially when Wilder foresaw not merely the eventual devastation in Europe and Asia, but recalled in the Nazi pogroms and the burning of 'decadent' literature a threat to all learning, particularly to metaphysics and the arts.
But if The Skin of Our Teeth answered the temper of its own time, it was less effectual when, during the early 1950's, it was toured about by the US State Department to demonstrate to world-wide sceptics that if America had its Senator McCarthy, it also had its native playwright and its avant garde culture…. [The] piece looked naïve and rather provincial. Wilder seemed less sure of himself and of his roots, less an American than a displaced European. The culture he feared losing (Plato, Spinoza, Moses and Homer) belonged to this hemisphere, not to his own. It looked as if his Mr Antrobus was geeing up his family or arguing with his conservative homebody wife, or turning away from tempting flesh or rebuilding a shattered society for the sake of received and entrenched ideas, not for the free play of intellect. It was all very Old World, safe and unadventurous. By the 50's the illusionistic or representational stage was on its way to becoming the dead issue it is today. (p. 38)
David Mayer, "Reviews: 'The Skin of Our Teeth'" (© copyright David Mayer 1977; reprinted with permission), in Plays and Players, Vol. 24, No. 6, March, 1977, pp. 38-9.
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