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 t...

[Was Wilder serious] when he wrote The Skin of our Teeth thirty-five years' ago? It still gives off an endearing skittishness, though one suspects that the author of this 'history of mankind in comic strip' was being more serious than he dared to let on with his theme of mothers stabilising man's inherent waywardness and lust making the world go round. Whatever he meant,… [this boisterously facetious parable reminds us] how such a play, because of its fundamental thoughtfu...