The Skin of Our Teeth (14 page)

The experimental techniques Wilder employed in 1942—the anachronisms, the asides, the interruptions—are now familiar to a twenty-first-century audience raised on modern theater and the television sitcom. And contemporary critics have squirmed in their seats at Wilder's proclamations about patriotism and loyalty and what one admirer of the play in 1975 summarized as a perceived tendency toward “excessively abstract, dreamy allegory, populated by stock characters of popular cliché.” Have the novelty of the play and its whimsy grown thin for some theatergoers? Perhaps. But what the record also shows is that because of its theatricality and humor, and the sheer craziness of exploring and producing what is known in the business as a “theatrical bible,”
The Skin of Our Teeth
continues to attract and to hold the attention of actors, audiences, playwrights, and students today, more than sixty years after it opened on Broadway.

—Tappan Wilder

     Chevy Chase, Maryland

 

 

Readings

During the Writing of the Play

A Letter

Wilder writes a newsy letter, from which this excerpt is taken, to his family from the Château Frontenac.

Sunday, Oct. 20, 1940, 11:10
P.M
.

Chateau Frontenac

Quebec, P.Q.

 

Dear Ones:

The first snow. And a surprise. I'd just—but I'd better tell you the whole afternoon.

After lunch, it being a fine day I thought I'd get out the car, just to keep my hand in. So I drove all around the Ile d'Orleans, the farms pretty well modernized, but great views of the great river and many yellow-ochre forests. Then I drove to the Falls of Montmorency—one hundred feet higher than Niagara, and a very fine sight. (Coleridge—I think it's Coleridge—“uses” them in a poem in that “Spirit of Man” anthology on your table there.) The water hurtles down creating a wide diversity of effects in lace and mist and rainbows and parsley-sprays and gossamer ladders and climbing serpents. And I had tea at a very nice hotel beside it, now unfortunately closed to residence, called Kent House, because it was the summer house of the Duke of Kent, Father of Queen Victoria, then Governor-General of New France.

Then I got home and went to church to Vespers at St. Matthew's, which on All Soul's Day—November first, as all readers of
Finnegans Wake
must know well—will celebrate its mere 150th anniversary, which must arouse a scornful laugh from the Roman Catholic churches, all fifty of them, nearby. Half the congregation was in uniform, and we prayed for the Royal Family, and sang “God Save the King,” and the Rector cast some of those condescending bathetic references to our dear boys in the service which would make a conscientious objector out of a Theodore Roosevelt.

Then I stopped for something to eat in town, knowing the worst, for the food in this city is so dreadful that when I eat anywhere except in this hotel I am indubitably poisoned and belch darkly throughout the night. Then I came home to couch on paper the new suggestions for Act Two that had arrived to me during Vespers—your church-going being a lively incentive to your playwriting, though the
point-de-départ
is left far behind. On my door I found word that a special delivery was waiting for me below. It seemed impossible that you could have already received and replied To my Special, and yet you're the only correspondent whom I told my address. I thought I had turned in for the night, but just before I went below to claim the letter I looked out of the window at my now cherished view and saw Everything Covered with Snow. Well, the first snow of the year is one of my fêtes, and I had always felt that Quebec, like Litchfield, and Oxford, and, I assume, Prague, mutely
waits
for snow. So I put on my overshoes—packed, remember? at the last moment, and have taken another walk. . . .

 

A Journal Entry

Wilder writes in his journal about the problems he continues to face in completing Act III, in which he wished to employ a device he first used in his one-act play
Pullman Car Hiawatha
in 1931. He wrote this entry on December 2, 1941, while visiting Alexander Woollcott's retreat on Neshobe Island in Vermont.

 

Again bogged down and frightened. Last month in New Haven not only did I tighten up Acts One and Two—I think I can say that with the exception of a short passage in Act Two they are finished, and good—but I wrote a “through” Third Act; but it is not right.

The employment of the “Pullman Car Hiawatha” material [in
Pullman Car Hiawatha,
published in the volume
The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act
(1931), minutes appear as gossips, hours as philosophers, and years as theologians] is (1) Dragged in indigestibly; (2) Insufficiently related to the surrounding material; (3) An incorrect statement of the central intention of the Act—is
that
intention, by the way, to be “save the cultural tradition?”—and (4) It smacks of the
faux-sublime.

To go back to first principles: what does one offer the audience as explanation of man's endurance, aim, and consolation? Hitherto, I had planned here to say that the existence of his children and the inventive activity of his mind keep urging him to continued and better-adjusted survival. In the Third Act I was planning to say that the ideas contained in the great books of his predecessors hang above him in mid-air furnishing him adequate direction and stimulation.

 

(1) Do I believe this?

(2) Have I found the correct theatrical statement for it?

(3) Is it sufficient climax for the play?

 

Taking these in turn: (1) I do believe it. I think the only trouble with it is that
there
is the point where the vast majority of writers hitherto would have planted the religious note. It's not so much that I deny that religious note as that it presents itself to me only intermittently and in terms too individualistic to enter the framework of this place.

(2) The statement that the ideas and books of the masters are the motive forces for man's progress is a difficult one to represent theatrically. The drawbacks against the “Pullman Car Hiawatha” treatment are that (a) the Hours-as-Philosophers runs the danger of being a cute fantasy and not a living striking metaphor, and (b) . . . I cannot find citations from the philosophers' works that briefly and succinctly express what I need here.

At all events, I have begun work as usual by excision. Out go the “people who had died in the house”—we have had enough of the common men who preceded our Antrobuses. Out also goes, I think, the natural history, though maybe that might be useful, not as giving the arch of the natural world that surrounds us, but as making more easy the identification of Stars and Hours with Philosophers and Artists. Out go the allusions to the various calendars—partly because it is so difficult to choose
one day
to cite. Into the earlier part of the Act should go, if I can keep Hours-Philosophers, much more reference to Mr. Antrobus's books.

Couldn't the quarrel between Henry and his father hang on Henry's contempt for the books that had led his father astray?

A Country at War

After returning from a monthlong trip to England in the fall of 1941, which took him from London to Bristol and Glasgow, Wilder spoke of his impressions on NBC Radio and wrote them in an article entitled “After a Visit to England” in
The Yale Review
, from which this excerpt is taken.

 

At times I felt like some passerby who has strayed by accident upon a stage where a play is in progress. Each of the highly dramatic episodes of the action was clear to me, but seemed to be misunderstood by the performers. Suddenly, however, I realized that I was a late arrival; that earlier in the play there had been a scene exhibiting these characters in some situation of a gravity so profound that there was no need to allude to it afterward; that allusion could only be inadequate, so it could only be disruptive. Back had flowed the spirit of the daily life, and only with close attention could the newcomer surprise some exchange between them of glance or gesture that recalled the vows they had taken and the agony they had shared. . . .

To overemphasize a few of such difficulties—common enough to other countries even when there is no confusion of crisis to complicate them—would be an injustice to the total magnificent achievement of civilian defense in Britain under the unheard-of conditions of the air raids. Yet to pass them over in silence would be to overlook an important new element in current attitudes. The principal thing in the mental temper of Britain is the unity and resolution exemplified in the self-imposed restraint and the co-operation of all citizens in the emergency. In a factory which produces certain delicate instruments for airplanes the workers had denied themselves three week-ends off in succession. Great was the anticipation for the recess finally accorded them. On the Friday before it they were called together at the noon hour and addressed by two air pilots each of whom had made over thirty flights into enemy territory. The airmen explained to them the urgency of the demand for the several hundred instruments that would be lost through the closing of the factory and asked them to remain at their tasks. The workers remained. On an historic estate in Sussex, a lady from Mayfair had herself milked the cow, churned the butter, and, with the help of one friend, cooked the dinner for six.

The enemy had first shown what a total war can be—every citizen bent to an activity directed against every citizen in the enemy country. Britain is making it clear that what the Germans have effected, first with rhetorical oratory, and finally with threats and coercion, a democracy can achieve with composure and free will.

Seeing His Play

After seeing
Skin
in November 1942, shortly before it opened in New York, Wilder, now an Air Force Intelligence officer, sent notes, through his dramatic agent, Harold Freedman, on the performance to Michael Myerberg (producer), Elia (“Gadgett”) Kazan (director), and his sister, Isabel (his representative). His report, from which this excerpt is taken, was mailed from Spokane, Washington, November 24, 1942.

 

Notes on the performance of
The Skin of Our Teeth,
(Harold, will you ask a secretary to type these out and provide copies for Michael, Gadgett and my sister, as I cannot take the time to write them separately.)

First place,—many thanks to all concerned for all the fine things about the performance. The following is a list of passages that I feel would be bettered, but that doesn't mean that I am not overwhelmingly grateful for what is already there.

For me the only real flaw in the present production is the hurry-hurry-hurry. The lack of variation in pace, in the First Act, from the time of Mr. Antrobus's entrance. This uniform onward rush prevents both the serious aspect of the play emerging (so necessary as preparation for the change of tone in Act III) and prevents a real sense of excitement in the possibility of danger before the oncoming ice.

Examples: The monotonous busy-busyness of the stage pace prevents any attention being given to Mrs. Antrobus' “No, they've been as good as gold—haven't had to raise my voice once”; to the interchange between Mr. and Mrs. A while he is playing with the animals. (Keep that mammoth quiet in many places,—he's the kind that will get worse and worse.) That conversation should have ominous weight, real pauses, and much violence at its climax—“The Sun's growing cold. What can I do about that?”

Also give Mr. A. a real moment with his—“Yes, any booby can play it with it now, etc.” inward, withdrawn, brooding.

The “Abel—my son—my son—Abel”—I beg you to go back to my original stage direction—she rises, sits again, rises . . . give the actors time to extract the maximum legitimate effect from these things.

Henry comes down the stairs with chairs or whatever it is and causes distraction at a vital moment.

Freddie does both his moment of despair in the chair and his Build up the Fire superbly, but it would be still stronger if the momentum about him had not been so rat-tat-tat uniform. Urge him to prepare the moments with even longer pauses, if he likes.

As Arthur Hopkins [a producer and director who admired the play and knew Wilder] said at the end of the First Act—“It's as though they had no faith in the play”—galloping as though the most they could hope for was the collection of a few laughs.

Controversy: The Playwright Finally Speaks

When Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson leveled their charges, Wilder was an acknowledged authority on Joyce's
Finnegans Wake
and his expertise in deciphering it was widely known in literary circles. Here in its entirety is the letter he wrote but did not send to the editor of
The Saturday Review of Literature
at the time of the first article, believing his rebuttal would only lead to further accusations and debate. The letter was found in Wilder's legal files and first published in 1999.

To the Editor of the Saturday Review of Literature.

Dear Sir:

Many thanks for your telephone call and your request that I comment upon the article in the Review pointing out some real and some imagined resemblances between my play,
The Skin of Our Teeth,
and James Joyce's novel,
Finnegans Wake.

At the time I was absorbed in deciphering Joyce's novel the idea came to me that one aspect of it might be expressed in drama: the method of representing mankind's long history through superimposing different epochs of time simultaneously. I even made sketches employing Joyce's characters and locale, but soon abandoned the project. The slight element of plot in the novel is so dimly glimpsed amid the distortions of nightmare and the polyglot distortions of language that any possibility of dramatization is out of the question. The notion of a play about mankind and the family viewed through several simultaneous layers of time, however, persisted and began to surround itself with many inventions of my own. If one subject is man and the family considered historically, the element of myth inevitably presents itself. It is not necessary to go to Joyce's novel to find the motive of Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Lilith and Noah.