The Skin of Our Teeth Essay | Critical Essay #4

The Skin of Our Teeth Critical Essay #4

Vaughn reviews the original Broadway production of "Wilder's play, finding the cast and production values to be of the highest quality. The critic feels, however, that the playwright's text does not achieve what his previous play, Our Town, did in terms of enchanting an audience.

Thornton Wilder in his new play has preached a sermon in a style joining asides like those of Saint Bernard with jarring juxtapositions like those of T. S. Eliot. Life, he wants to say, is struggle to discover truth, to build material conditions in the image of truth and above all to subdue natural forces and human anger, lust and unreason. Within himself and without, everyman meets such forces—inexhaustible supplies of arrogant energy blindly seeking his moral and material destruction. Working day and night they make moral and physical development a process ever balanced on the "razor edge of danger." Wilder says through this...
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