The Skin of Our Teeth

One always wishes that Thornton Wilder were as intelligent as he is theatrically gifted. After his stagecraft enchants and grips you, you're left with the truisms and slightly awry profundity of his philosophy. He converts the theatre into a sympathetic, subtle medium and then ignores its potential to sermonize. But his humor is so warm, and his juggling of conventions so hypnotic, that you're a hundred steps out of the theatre before you realize you've been hoodwinked into sentimentality.

The Skin Of Our Teeth, as Stephen Nightingale directs it at Lowell House, carries off Wilder's con game with only a few pratfalls. The play is a loosely conceived Everyman telling the never-ending story of Mr. George Antrobus (Stuart Beck), his wife (Mary Belle Felten-stein), and two kids (John Sansone and Jody Adams). Wilder places this New Jersey family in the Ice Age, the flood, and the end of World War II (which wasn't over in 1942), revelling in anachronism and exploded convention.

The trick of the play is in the way it hops through theatrical reality. The characters are alternately naturalistic figures, farceurs, symbols and their supposed real-life selves. To be successful, each convention must be exaggerated so it can be fittingly deflated.

The Lowell House production does this admirably most of the time, but has a tendency to mix, or imperfectly finish its conventions. The third act opening (where the play stops because seven of the company are struck with botulism) is magnificent and hilarious because the whole company, especially Beck and Jamie Rosenthal (playing a Miss Somerset playing Sabina, George Antrobus' maid and quondam mistress) degenerates from high flown symbols to grumbling Loebies. The switch is drastic and devastating.

But other switches don't make it. Miss Rosenthal has trouble in her flip-flops between being a character and a disgruntled actress. She's petulant and funny as the latter, but too timid and line-swallowing as the former. She should go at being a scatterbrained maid and occasional seductress with the assurance she displays as a bitching second lead.

Miss Feltenstein is powerful in the dramatic scenes as the indomitable mother-figure part of the eternal feminine. But it is her voice that commands. Her motions are stiff and awkward in key scenes. Nightingale who outfits a comic chorus with amazing props and movements (they make marvelous animals going into the Ark), seems to have directed disembodied voices in the serious scenes. Even Beck, the company's most polished performer, often appears unsure of what to do with his hands at dramatic moments. The power of the scenes, especially the ends of the three acts, is undercut.

The set also interferes with the play's effect. It is a rough spectrum of colored flats that are organized into two sets. But the realistic furniture and the intrusive, mammoth Lowell House chandelier make it seem out of place. It would have been funnier, and more striking to have maintained a single convention, constructing a semi-realistic room that would have incorporated the chandelier into a monstrous parody of the traditional box set.

But these handicaps of direction and design only weaken, rather than obliterate the play's effects. The acting, especially the sound of the acting--Miss Rosenthal's hiccuppy weeping, Miss Adams' little-girl boasting, or Sansone's rebellious snarling--is consistently fine. And the chorus adds needed depth to the show.

Nightingale could have used bolder, more purely defined directorial strokes. But if fuzzy, the production is also funny. And in Wilder's characteristically ephemeral way it is moving theater.