Religious and Mythological Allusions:
• Cain and Abel: the sons of Adam and Eve. Cain murders his brother out of jealousy.
• The story appears in almost identical form in Judaism (the Old Testament Bible, Genesis 4:1-18) and in Islam (the Qu’ran, 5:27-31). In both sources, it is an injunction against murder.
• Noah and the Flood: In Genesis, chapters 6-9, mankind becomes so wicked that God sends a flood that wipes out all human beings except the virtuous Noah and his family, who at God’s instruction ride out the flood with a pair of every kind of animal in an ark. Many religions and mythologies include some type of flood narrative.
• Lilith/Jezebel: Lilith is a feminine demonic figure from Mesopotamian and other ancient mythologies who is sometimes said to have been Adam’s first wife. Jezebel is a figure from the Old Testament and other mythologies accused of various sins. Recent depictions of a once-in-a-lifetime flood include Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust, vol. 1: La Belle Sauvage.
In The Skin of Our Teeth, the playwright, Thornton Wilder, puts this literary device of anachronism to work. Some examples include:
• A dinosaur and a woolly mammoth as household pets.
• A contemporary suburban household that is threatened by an Ice Age.
• Mr. Antrobus sends a telegram to his family informing them that he has spent the day at his office inventing the alphabet.
• Sabina is one of the so-called Sabine Women: In ancient times, the city of Rome was constantly at war with its smaller neighbors. One famous episode in these wars was the “Kidnapping” or “Abduction” of the women in these smaller cities (in the Sabine region).
• The refugees who arrive in Act 1 include Homer, Moses, and the Nine Muses.
• Philosophers: In Act 3, two of the philosophers (Plato and Aristotle ) lived in ancient Greece, and Spinoza lived during the seventeenth century in what is now Holland.
Archetype: The original character who serves as the model for countless later characters, for example: Achilles as the archetypal warrior; Hippolyta, the Queen of the Amazons, as the archetypal woman warrior; and Merlin as the archetypal wizard/magician. Later examples of these three archetypes include Luke Skywalker, Wonder Woman, and Albus Dumbledore.
Survival: In The Skin of Our Teeth, the characters struggle to survive one disaster after another. In Act 1, they are confronted with a second Ice Age, which they survive by sheer willpower. In Act 2, they face a storm that brings a flood of literally Biblical proportions, which the characters will ride out thanks to George Antrobus’s resourcefulness (with a little help from the Fortune Teller). And in Act 3, the characters have outlasted (barely) a seemingly endless, unwinnable war. The characters, like the human race, survive these threats by the skin of their teeth – but they do survive.
War: Thornton Wilder does not specify what the war is about, or even who the enemy is, choosing to leave these details deliberately vague.
Pattern Plot: The same plot elements occurring repeatedly to create a cycle. In The Skin of Our Teeth, the Antrobus family keep facing disaster, but they also keep surviving.
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FUN FACTS ABOUT
The Skin Of Our Teeth
There is no town in New Jersey named “Excelsior.” The word is Latin, and it means “ever upward.”
FUN FACTS ABOUT
Breaking the Fourth Wall Sabina frequently breaks the fourth wall to address the audience, and in Act 3 the Stage Manager and the “actor playing George Antrobus” do as well. Many recent movies, including Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the Deadpool movies, include characters who break the fourth wall. Can you think of other movies or shows that do this? Why might an author or screenwriter do this? How do you, as an audience member, respond when you see this?