About the Play:

Winner of the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

The Skin of Our Teeth is a full-length comedy by Thornton Wilder. The story of the modern-looking Antrobuses, a 5,000-year-old family that endures many from ancient times to the present, including the Ice Age, a Biblical-like flood, a cataclysmic war and famine, always able to start over and begin anew, in Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece.

The Skin of Our Teeth takes place in a prehistoric world and the New Jersey suburbs. This groundbreaking satiric fantasy follows the wacky dysfunctional every-family called Antrobus (Greek for "human being"), an "Eternal Family" who narrowly escape one disaster after another, from ancient times to the present. Meet George and Maggie Antrobus (married only 5,000 years); their two children, Gladys and Henry (perfect in every way!); and their seductive maid, Sabina (the ageless temptress) as they overcome the Great Flood, fire, pestilence, locusts, the Ice Age, the pox and the double feature, a dozen subsequent wars and as many depressions – by the skin of their teeth. Ultimately, they are the stuff of which heroes and buffoons are made. Their survival is a vividly theatrical testament of faith in humanity. The Skin of Our Teeth is, after Our Town, his greatest play.

The Skin of Our Teeth had a pre-Broadway engagement in 1942 at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. It premiered at the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway and ran for 359 performances, 26 more than "Our Town", winning the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The show enjoyed numerous revivals and tours and has become a popular choice for regional repertory, high school, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 4 or 5 female, 4 or 5 male, plus many small parts with doubling

What people say:

"Wonderfully wise... A tremendously exciting and profound stage fable." — The New York Herald Tribune

"For an American dramatist, all roads lead back to Thornton Wilder... The Skin Of Our Teeth was a remarkable gift to an America entrenched in catastrophe, a tribute to the trait of human endurance." — Paula Vogel, playwright

About the Playwright:

Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) was an acclaimed American novelist and playwright whose works, exploring the connection between the commonplace and cosmic dimensions of human experience, continue to be read and produced around the world. He also enjoyed enormous success with many other forms of the written and spoken word, among them teaching, acting, the opera, and cinema. A three time Pulitzer Prize winner and the only winner for both fiction and drama, his many honours include the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Book Committee's Medal for Literature.