Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth is 67 years old but it plays as if it had been written and workshopped last week by one of those Austin indie arts groups of which we are so proud.
It's wild stuff --a history of humankind as embodied by the Antrobus family, with a mad mix-up of times, epic figures, surreal settings and primal myths. Refract that story through the lens of a dramatic structure that the author and actors keep yanking out from under you, dress it up with Lowell Bartholomee's videos, and live with the fact that you never know what's going to happen next.
Wilder wasn't shy about announcing the epic proportions of this tragicomedy. The family's last name is "Antrobus" -- a label that shouts "human being" or "humankind," derived from the Greek άνθρωπος ("anthropos" -- as in, for example, "anthropology").
Your first act is located in an apparently modern New Jersey, except that it's not modern -- the Ice Age is encroaching.
November 13 – December 5, 2009 The Vortex, 2307 Manor Road (map)
Thursdays – Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m. No Performance on Thanksgiving Day, November 26 Added performance Wednesday, December 2
Pick your Price: $15, $20, $25, $30
Different Stages opens its 2009–2010 season with Thornton Wilder’s comedy The Skin of Our Teeth. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this is the satiric story of the extraordinary Antrobus family down through the ages from the time of the war – any war. They have survived flood, fire, pestilence, the seven year locusts, the ice age, the pox and the double feature, a dozen wars and as many depressions. Ultimately bewitched, befuddled and becalmed, they are the stuff of which heroes and buffoons are made. Their survival is a wacky testament of faith in humanity.
