America: Boom, Bust, and Baseball Guide: Laughing at the End of the World, Thornton Wilder’s Mad Look at the Apocalypse

The world is ending-again. Glaciers have bulldozed Boston and a baby mammoth is frozen to the sidewalk. What’s a New Jersey family to do?

For the Antrobuses, heroes of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, catastrophe is commonplace. Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus aren’t just New Jersey natives; they are also Adam and Eve. Against all odds, they have survived for millennia, bombarded by plague and locusts, floods and fires, wars and famine. How do they do it?

Wilder suggests that we find the will to endure in the legacy of the past. The great books of civilization are George Antrobus’s lullaby. At night, alone in the wreckage of war, George whispers their words to himself. Their ideas inspire him to rebuild the world, trying to make it better than the one that has collapsed. Stirred by their words, George believes that we can and must create the world anew. Shakespeare, Spinoza, Aristotle-these writers give George hope. In them, he finds the will to survive.

When The Skin of Our Teeth was staged in Germany after World War II, it took on a painful reality. The play was a smash hit in a country digging itself out from the ruins of war. Wilder wrote that productions were mounted “in the shattered churches and beerhalls that were serving as theaters, with audiences whose price of admission meant the loss of a meal and for whom it was of absorbing interest that there was a ‘recipe for grass soup that did not cause the diarrhea.'”

Like George Antrobus, the Germans sought comfort in their cultural past. Finding strength in their best artists-Goethe and Schiller, Beethoven and Brahms-they began again, sweeping their streets and building new homes from old stones.

In The Skin of Our Teeth, Germans not only saw their future; in the character of Henry they also saw their past. Henry kills on a whim, enacting the story of Cain and Abel with the murder of his brother. He burns the books his father loves and revels in carnage. From the beginning, Wilder was asked if Henry represented Hitler’s Germany. Like the Antrobuses, Germans had to acknowledge that evil hides in all of us, waiting for a chance to burst out.

While Germans wholeheartedly embraced Wilder’s play, Americans gave it a cold shoulder. Its world premiere in 1942 at the Plymouth Theater in New York City met with critical approval but public disdain. The audience response was so terrible that cabs gathered in front of the theater every night after the first act to pick up fleeing spectators. Playgoers apparently agreed with Miss Somerset in Act I: “I don’t understand a single word of it, anyway,- all about the troubles the human race has gone through, there’s a subject for you.” Theatergoers found the play incomprehensible. Why such disgust?

Perhaps audiences thought the play’s mix of the serious and slapstick too strange. By overlapping prehistoric ages, biblical time, and modern day, Wilder creates absurdity: “Did you milk the mammoth?” wife Maggie asks, standing in her New Jersey living room, her pet dinosaur trotting by, complaining of the cold. Likewise, Sabina, the maid, jokes about Henry’s murder: “Henry, when he has a stone in his hand, has a perfect aim; he can hit anything from a bird to an older brother-Oh! I didn’t mean to say that!-but it certainly was an unfortunate accident, and it was very hard getting the police out of the house.”

In production, it is hard to strike a balance between solemnity and silliness. As a result, The Skin of Our Teeth has been neglected in comparison with Wilder’s Our Town, one of America’s most popular and most produced plays. Director Scott Zigler, however, turns to the play for its comic energy. According to Zigler, many productions take the play too seriously, missing its humor and driving the audience into the ground with moral lessons. Since Wilder said that all serious work must be playful, The Skin of Our Teeth can only succeed in the context of comedy.

All lessons aside, the play is funny: “The sun rose this morning at 6:32 a.m. This gratifying event was first reported by Mrs. Dorothy Stetson of Freeport, Long Island, who promptly telephoned the mayor. The Society for Affirming the End of the World at once went into a special session and postponed the arrival of that event for TWENTY-FOUR HOURS.” Today, we’re still living the next act of the Antrobuses’ story: ecological meltdown, recession, terrorism, and nuclear weapons in hostile hands. Wilder understood that comedy is the only way to grasp ideas that scare us. Laughter is essential to survival.

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