78 THENEWYORKER,M AY 9, 2022
THETHEATRE
FREE SPEECH
Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth,” revamped.BY VINSON CUNNINGHAM
ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH MAZZETTI
W
ithout quite knowing why, I’ve
always disliked the truism that
conflict is drama’s fundamental ingre-
dient. Yes, we fight and cajole and coax
and settle scores: that’s our species, and
it’s frequently how we show ourselves
onstage. But this bit of craft wisdom—
conflict is king—is the handmaiden of
a paranoid anthropology, and a limited
way of thinking about action and speech.
We humans do much more than strug-
gle, will against will. And our talk isn’t
strictly coefficient with our need to act
upon or influence others for our own
ends. Often, to the contrary, it springs
from a mysterious overflow of unbid-
den feeling, more a free gift of sound
and syntax—of humor, of love—than a
blunt instrument of acquisition.
Moments of high and bizarre politi-
cal and social drama send us rushing back
to fundamentals—what a person is, why
we do what we do—in art as much as in
life. So I’ve been watching plays these
days—especially during April’s overflow
of Broadway premières racing to make
the deadline for Tony eligibility—hop-
ing to discover onstage new ways of think-
ing about theatrical speech.
I was heartened, therefore, to see
the actor Roslyn Ruff anchoring a new
production of Thornton Wilder’s Pu-
litzer Prize-winning 1942 play, “The
Skin of Our Teeth,” directed by Lile-ana Blain-Cruz (in a Lincoln Center
Theatre production, at the Vivian Beau-
mont). Ruff is a fantastically talented
performer whose great gift is her abil-
ity to dissect long speeches, searching
them for pleasing rhythms and hidden
melodies. I still think back to Jackie
Sibblies Drury’s 2018 play, “Fairview,”
in which Ruff played a chic, cutting
aunt who, at a moment of growing ten-
sion, went off on a zany riff about how
families weather troubles in the mov-
ies. Her delivery of that monologue con-
vinced me that I’d listen to Ruff say al-
most anything, just as I’d pay to hear
some singers hum through the names
in the telephone book.
In “The Skin of Our Teeth,” Ruff
plays Mrs. Antrobus, the matriarch of
the Antrobus family. The Antrobuses—a
skewed nuclear unit whose surname is
close to anthropos, Greek for “man”—
scuttle frenetically through the disjointed
action of Wilder’s play, standing in for
humanity at various fraught junctures.
The play’s three acts don’t tell a unified
story, but what they have in common is
the threat of impending doom.
At the beginning, it becomes clear
that the Antrobuses are living in some
dreamlike amalgam of the Ice Age and
a suburb called Excelsior, New Jersey.
They’re almost like a family in a vin-
tage sitcom. George (the galvanizing
James Vincent Meredith), the husband
and father, is a kind of Promethean do-
mestic hero. He’s the inventor of the
wheel, the lever, and sundry other doo-
dads necessary to civilization. Mrs. An-
trobus is, we’re told, “the charming and
gracious president of the Excelsior
Mothers’ Club.” Their kids are Gladys
(Paige Gilbert) and Henry ( Julian Rob-
ertson, convincingly troubled but also
funny), two highly strung rapscallions
who can’t help sensing oncoming di-
saster: “Mama, I’m hungry. Mama, why
is it so cold?”
They’ve also got a huge source of
family shame to deal with: Henry used
to be named Cain, and, at some point
in the past, he killed his brother, Abel.
That’s the logic of the play—it employs
so many deft and often slapstick allu-
sions to classical, Biblical, and philo-
sophical texts that it would be impos-
sible to account for them all without an
encyclopedia, or a raft of footnotes that
Lileana Blain-Cruz’s show is less a faithful adaptation than a work of criticism. ran as long as the play. To the extent