THEATER : ‘Skin’ Is Wilder at Heart : Comedy of Modern Ice Age Family Was Ahead of Its Time

Of all the major American playwrights whose work was staged on Broadway during the 1930s and 1940s, Thornton Wilder was by far the most experimental. His eagerness to challenge theatrical tradition, both in form and content, is justly celebrated.

Not for him “the ossified conventions of the well-made play,” as he confided to his diary, nor the idea of realistic presentation. His goals, he once wrote in answer to a questionnaire, were “breaking down that box-set, abolishing that curtain, getting rid of that museum-visit that is suggested by the proscenium.”

Wilder’s two best efforts in this regard--”Our Town” and “The Skin of Our Teeth”--met with uncommon success during their time, even while engendering controversy. Each of the original productions had a long Broadway run. Each won a Pulitzer Prize, in 1938 and 1943 respectively. And each is now considered a classic.

But while it is hard to find an established theater company that hasn’t revived “Our Town”--South Coast Repertory did in 1971, for example, and the Grove Shakespeare Festival is planning to in the fall--it is somewhat harder to find one that has mounted “Skin” (neither SCR nor the Grove has).

The Laguna Playhouse staged both plays--”Our Town” in 1946 and “Skin” in 1964--but so long ago that it still seems fair to say the Alternative Theatre Company will be living up to its name with its “Skin of Our Teeth” revival, opening Friday in Santa Ana.

Wilder, for all his adventurousness, never kidded himself about being truly avant-garde; he knew he was writing for a mainstream audience. Unlike James Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake,” which Wilder took for his touchstone, “Skin” could not employ the “night language” of the unconscious with all its interior puns and private meanings.

“(My) attempt to do a play in which the protagonist is 20,000-year-old man and whose heroine is 20,000-year-old woman,” Wilder wrote in his diary, “makes me see all the more clearly how necessary for Joyce it was, with a similar self-assignment, to invent a grotesque tortuous style of his own.”

But Wilder believed “The Skin of Our Teeth” could tap into “the only remaining possibility” for 20th-Century drama--”the comic, the grotesque, and the myth as mock-heroic”--just as that Irish fabulist’s novel did.

And so he created the Antrobuses, his equivalent of the Joycean Earwicker family, in a farcical, three-act opus filled with anachronistic jokes, satirical wisecracks and vaudeville-style sendups of history, biblical legend and modern society.

We meet George and Maggie Antrobus, the prototypical suburbanites of Excelsior, N.J., who have been married for 5,000 years; their over-rouged maid, Sabina, who keeps reminding the audience she doesn’t understand a word of the play, much less believe it, and the teen-age Antrobus children, Gladys, forever mooning over movie stars, and nasty but clean-cut Henry, who has changed his name from Cain.

George Antrobus is a pillar of the church and the president of the Ancient Order of Mammals. He commutes like clockwork to and from the office, where he has come up with a some nifty inventions, the wheel and the alphabet among them. Mrs. Antrobus is a model housewife who manages to overlook her husband’s occasional sexual peccadilloes and devotes herself like a tigress to her children.

But life in Excelsior is no American dream. It is the Ice Age, after all. A towering glacier is pressing from the north. Flood also threatens, along with war, disease, hurricanes--every imaginable disaster, natural or man-made. Even the dumb back-yard pets, a mammoth and a dinosaur, are smart enough to run for cover.

All these cartoonish shenanigans may sound familiar to anyone who has seen “The Flintstones” on television. But “The Skin of Our Teeth” definitely was ahead of its time. What’s more, the smash-hit Broadway production had the benefit of a stellar cast overflowing with repressed energy from some heavy backstage squabbling.

A typically over-the-top Tallulah Bankhead is said to have stolen the show as Sabina, apparently convincing audiences that she was ad-libbing when she broke character with her nonplussed wisecracks about the play. Ironically, Bankhead landed the role in spite of Wilder’s reluctance to give it to her.

Fredric March and his wife, Florence Eldridge, starred as Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus (Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne had turned down the roles). Montgomery Clift, then little known, played Henry. E.G. Marshall was also in the cast. And Elia Kazan directed, in what was only his second Broadway outing.

Time magazine called it “spectacular stagecraft.” The New York Times described it as “the best pure theater.” The New Yorker declared it “by far the most interesting and exciting (play) seen that year.” The curmudgeon Alexander Woollcott wrote Wilder (admittedly a close friend) that “no American play has ever come anywhere near it. I think it might have been written by Plato and Lewis Carroll in collaboration.”

But “Skin” had its detractors. Mary McCarthy, then a young theater critic for the left-wing Partisan Review, found it spurious as well as provincial. She took Wilder to task for insisting “that the Roman in his toga is simply a bourgeois citizen wearing a sheet, and that Neanderthal man with his bearskin and club is at heart an insurance salesman at a fancy-dress ball.”

She saw the experimental, non-realistic format as an elaborate pretense, just as she saw Bankhead’s antics. “Actually there is not a word in the play which Miss Bankhead cannot and does not comprehend,” McCarthy noted. “All this aspect of the play is, to put it frankly, fraudulent, an illusionist’s trick . . . to persuade the audience that it is witnessing a complex and difficult play, while what is really being shown on the stage is of a childish and painful naivete.”

Meanwhile, a pair of academic scholars charged in the Saturday Review, among the most widely circulated literary magazines of the time, that Wilder had plagiarized “Finnegan’s Wake” in concept and detail. He went so far as to crib lines verbatim, they pointed out.

Literary critic Edmund Wilson, along with others, came to Wilder’s defense. Wilson argued that the playwright was a Joyce devotee and, far from hiding his creative debt, often gave lectures on “Finnegan’s Wake.” Moreover, Wilson noted, “Joyce is a great quarry, like Flaubert,” and Wilder “a poet with a form and imagination of his own who may find his themes where he pleases without incurring the charge of imitation.”

Wilder privately concurred. He felt no need to defend himself publicly until years later, when the accusation continued to linger. And even then, according to one of his many biographers, Gilbert A. Harrison, Wilder liked to joke: “As the shoplifter said to a judge in Los Angeles: ‘I only steal from the best department stores, and they don’t miss it.’ ”

* “The Skin of Our Teeth” opens Friday at the Alternative Repertory Theatre, 1636 S. Grand Ave., Santa Ana. Performances continue Thursdays to Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 7 p.m., though June 16. Tickets: $10 to $12.50 (opening night, $15). Information: (714) 836-7929.