ABSTRACT
The Skin of Our Teeth telescopes a huge swath of western history and myth into a domestic family tragicomedy. As in Our Town, Wilder stages a kind of theatrical ode to daily family life in the face of mortality. If Our Town invokes equanimity and a renewed attention to the small stu, The Skin of Our Teeth reaches outward, swallowing the world. In the latter play Wilder calls for audacious feats of staging and a wildly anachronistic amalgam of periods and mythologies smashed together so forcefully that the play tears at its seams.
