Seattle Rep swings big with surreal classic 'The Skin of Our Teeth'

By Gemma Wilson for Seattle Times arts and culture writer

We’ve all made a thousand “What is time?” jokes since 2020, as the weeks, months and years have seemed to accordion in on themselves, making it impossible to remember how long ago anything happened. 

But in Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth” — an energetic, entertaining production of which is running through Oct. 20 at Seattle Rep, the first production helmed by the Rep’s new Artistic Director Dámaso Rodríguez — the question bears a very literal application. There’s a dinosaur in the midcentury New Jersey living room of the Antrobus family, and also a mammoth, and later many major figures in Western history, from Homer to Moses. And the alphabet is currently being invented by Mr. Antrobus, who also invented the wheel, and also an ice age is coming. So, seriously, what is time? 

This ice age is just one of the disasters faced by the Antrobus family: Mr. Antrobus (an excellent Carlos Lacámara); his wife of nearly 5,000 years, Mrs. Antrobus (Emily Kuroda); and their children Henry, formerly known as Cain (Chip Sherman), and Gladys (Rachel Guyer-Mafune). Along with their quippy, sardonic maid Sabina (Sara Hennessy, delightful), this clan faces a freezing world in Act 1. In Act 2, led by Mr. Antrobus, now president of the human race, they all escape the wrath of a biblical storm, and save the animals, two by two. In Act 3, after a seven-year war has ravaged humanity, the indefatigable family again begins to rebuild.

While often secondary in reputation to Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play ”Our Town,” which premiered in 1938, his 1942 play “The Skin of Our Teeth” (also a Pulitzer winner) has had something of a resurgence in recent years, including a Broadway revival in 2022. There’s no secret why; art contemplating the end of the world, while perennially popular among artists, has felt especially resonant with audiences these days. And your stomach may twist horribly, like mine did, hearing a fictional newsman announce an impossible wall of ice hitting Vermont after a day spent reading very real news stories about an also-impossible flood ravaging Asheville, N.C. 

Because Wilder never liked the fourth wall, “real” life keeps breaking in throughout the play, in the form of actor breakdowns or backstage interruptions, often from an inexplicably frazzled stage manager (Sunam Ellis). But Sabina is the biggest culprit; she hates the fourth wall as much as Wilder, but even more, “I hate this play and every word in it,” she tells the audience. 

After several lean years in the theater, it’s a thrill to see a theater go big, in many senses of the word: a big, gorgeous set (which seems like a real romp for set designer Stephanie Kerley Schwartz); big ideas; big scale — on opening night the three-act play, with two intermissions, clocked in at nearly three hours — and a big cast. 

In addition to the show’s 14 professional actors, “Skin” includes three rotating casts of 11 to 13 community members, with as many as 14 additional walk-on performers in every performance. The Rep did away with the community-focused Public Works program earlier this year, but this production is a sort of test balloon to see if infusing the Public Works values into a full Rep production will work moving forward. …

Sabina’s cynicism espouses one point of view on humanity: “How do we know that it’ll be any better than before?” Sabina asks. “Why do we go on pretending?” And it would be a fair take to side with her here, directorially, but Rodriguez’s lively, generous production seems to agree with Mr. Antrobus that the human race, and human achievement, are worth fighting for. After the war’s end, Mr. Antrobus is desperate to know if his beloved books have survived. With those books the Antrobuses, as they always have, will keep the intellectual and emotional fires of humanity burning. 

Because there are always lights in the darkness. “Nothing matters, it’ll all be the same in a hundred years,” Sabina says. But she later tells us, with hope in her voice, “The end of this play isn’t written yet,” because it never is. Even if we keep reaching the same conclusions, we get to keep trying, and striving, and learning, and caring for one another. Maybe one day we’ll get it right. Or, at least, more right — right?