What would you do if you knew that the world was about to end? Would you even believe it was ending? What if you were the only person who did?
Climate change so severe that a glacier moves as far south as New Jersey. A second Ice Age so harsh that dogs are freezing to the sidewalks—in August. Refugees seeking shelter from extreme weather in a suburban living room. Party animals who continue to celebrate, even though an impending hurricane has just caused a weather signal to register “The End of the World.” And a war that everyone believes will finally end all wars, but only because they also believe that this war will never end, not because they expect that it will usher in an age of peace.
And yet the war does end. The human race survives the hurricane. And even though at the end of Act 1 of The Skin of Our Teeth everyone seems in imminent danger of freezing to death, by the beginning of the very next Act the Antrobus family are alive and well and partying like there’s no tomorrow. The human race continues to be confronted, over and over again, with alarming existential threats. But as Sabina notes at the play’s conclusion, “The end of this play isn’t written yet,” and her words reflect playwright Thornton Wilder’s conviction that the end of the human race hadn’t been written yet either.
Wilder’s optimism is all the more persuasive because it isn’t grounded in denial or in sentimentalism. He knew perfectly well that human beings are hopelessly flawed, and that if the human race keeps confronting disasters, it’s because the human race keeps creating them. Wilder began writing The Skin of Our Teeth in 1940, at the start of World War II. By the time the play opened on Broadway, in November 1942, the United States had been at war for almost a year, with no end in sight. For the play’s earliest audiences, Act 3 must have provided a welcome spark of hope, for it begins with the end of a war that has lasted seven years, and that the characters feared might never end.
In the roughly eighty years since the play opened, many more global disasters have occurred that have destroyed families, communities, and even entire countries. Some of these calamities have been depressingly familiar, such as wars and pandemics. Others are relatively new, such as the rapidly accelerating threats posed by climate change (although the denial that some people demonstrate about our shared global peril is, unfortunately, nothing new). The challenges that the Antrobus family repeatedly confront have never stopped feeling relevant, and paradoxically the characters seem immortal because they are so very human.
It therefore makes sense that The Skin of Our Teeth continues to be performed frequently; yet the play’s ongoing relevance could not, by itself, account for its enduring popularity. With rare exceptions, most plays that are merely bleak without offering any hope aren’t very well-liked, let alone fun, yet The Skin of Our Teeth is both. The play offers us hope not in spite of human frailty, but because, as Wilder shows us, human foolishness can sometimes lead to human resilience. The play leaves us with a deep appreciation for people’s ability to find a way forward by forgiving each other and trying again. In The Skin of Our Teeth, the inevitability of human mistakes fosters the very strength and optimism that allow us to fight against the existential threats that repeatedly come our way, and to face bravely the end of the world as we know it—over and over again.
Ice image: torsten-dederichs unsplash.com.