Snoring at the Intiman: The Skin of Our Teeth

Friday night around 11pm we were approaching the third hour of Thorton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth at the Intiman when our friend Boo (of Quiltsryche fame) leaned over and whispered, "This is fucking retarded." The snoring old ladies on either side of us tacitly agreed. How did this pseudo-absurdist, Capra-esque, steaming pile of maudlin cheese from the guy who wrote Our Town win the Pulitzer?

The play was not without its redeeming highlights, like the woolly mammoth (pictured above), who elicited a lot of "awww"s from the crowd as he sadly groaned and moped off the stage, out in to the ice age and extinction. The effect, like reuniting with whatever inner child is in us that cries whenever we think about the Muppets, was unfortunately later disemboweled when, during the first of two intermissions, as the set was taken down and rebuilt, the mammoth costume could be seen hanging up on the wall in the back like the lifeless prop that it is. Was this effect an intentional part of the play? Probably. There are tons of such meta moments throughout that draw your attention out of disbelief suspension: early on in the first act, the maid character deviates from the official script to talk candidly with the audience about the play; at the beginning of the third act, the characters sit around rehearsing their lines with the director; etc. Wilder was post-modern before post-modern was cool, and that stuff is fine to a point, but it kind of undermines the effect of seeing these people later give posturing lectures on the eternal promise of marriage or the value of perseverance during war time.

All this reminded us of how much all the creative writing kids bitched and moaned when we had to read Our Town out loud in high school English. They complained it was too cliched and corny, and the grand speeches seemed so dramatically unearned. We thought about how Wilder, torturing teens from beyond the grave for generations, may have earned a reputation as the Freddy Krueger of literature, but then there are probably more depressing "classic" writers, like Thomas Hardy or Gustav Flaubert, who might deserve that title more so.

(Unrelated aside: the woman sitting next to us who talked on her cell phone during the first act should be forced to watch this play again a hundred times in a row with her eyeballs pried open Clockwork-Orange style, and the ushers at the Intiman deserve six figure paychecks for their efficiency and professionalism, particularly with how they handled all those annoying late comers. Mad props to you, Intiman ushers.)