Five Broadway Revivals Give a Tour of Our Theatrical Past

New productions of American plays that debuted between 1942 and 2002 offer glimpses into the world in which they first emerged — and into ours.

By Jesse Green for The New York Times

I was 15 when I appeared in a camp production of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth” — I mean “camp” in the sense of a summer sleep-away experience, though the other meaning may apply too. What, after all, were a bunch of naïve teenagers doing in this surreal, existential tragicomedy by the author of “Our Town,” with its mash-up of biblical revisionism, theatrical satire and apocalyptic escapades?

We were reviving it, I guess; “The Skin of Our Teeth” had premiered more than 30 years earlier, in 1942. Still, if our summer production marked a low point in its history, that history did not end with us; as Wilder dramatizes so effectively in the saga of the Antrobus family persisting through eons, the world keeps revolving and its central stories return.

So, this spring, will “The Skin of Our Teeth” — and it won’t be alone. Broadway will also offer revivals of four other plays, each from a different decade: “Plaza Suite” from the ’60s, “American Buffalo” from the ’70s, “How I Learned to Drive” from the ’90s and “Take Me Out” from the aughts. Of course, revivals are always a part of the Broadway mix but, taken together, this year’s constitute an especially vivid time capsule of our theater over the last 80 years. They offer a glimpse at the world into which they first emerged, and also a glimpse at ours.

That double vision will be explicit in “The Skin of Our Teeth,” a Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. Connecting its theme of survival despite near-extinction to the Black experience, Blain-Cruz has assembled a cast — including James Vincent Meredith, Roslyn Ruff, Gabby Beans and Priscilla Lopez — that “embodies the complexity that is America,” she says.

The play welcomes and models that complexity: Written during World War II, it reflects calamity in both story and style. Time collapses; though they live in 20th-century New Jersey, the Antrobuses are threatened by war, a flood and a Pleistocene ice sheet. Among the roles are the poet Homer, a mastodon, the biblical Cain — and the actress playing the maid, who keeps breaking character.

With the major exception of Edward Albee, Broadway dramatists did not much take up Wilder’s surrealistic thread in the next few decades. The ’50s were dominated by “problem plays,” generally naturalistic and narrowly pointed. (A very fine one, “Trouble in Mind,” from 1955, was revived earlier this season.) The ’60s brought us, among other trends, the middle-class urban comedy of which Neil Simon was the leading proponent.

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