Broadway Review “The Skin of Our Teeth”: Ice Ages, Civil War and Everything Old That Is New Again

The brontosaurus and woolly mammoth, which inhabit the household objects of modern New Jersey middle class, will now and forever have a theatrical impact, which, at least, hasn’t changed since the time of playwright Thornton Wilder, but it does. He has many more, especially all the skills. the skin of our teethLeading the postmodern avant-garde in the 1943 Pulitzer Prize, which only attempts the strength of the postmodern avant-garde.

The major new revival of the Lincoln Center Theater is the show, directed by Liliana Blaine-Cruz, with additional material by Brendan Jacobs-Jenkins and the tireless efforts of exemplary actors, which effectively lends the newfound vitality to the show, which is an often most admirable. of what she loved. Endurance training – for the actor, for the audience – the skin of our teeth Gone is the novelty of the passage of time, the allegorical flourishing of the successive (and, frankly, less lazy) successors – from Cyril Churchill to Tony Kushner to the Wachowskis – so it seems to face all the innate challenges of the game. It requires insight, possibly ruthlessness and, of course, a solid understanding of the current cause of the job.

Blaine Cruz actually only shows periodic moments of these elements, and so on. The skin of our teeth In a short sequence, he saves himself from the traditional slogan of the opera.

With black actors, love of lure, and hints of youthful anger that seem as essential as black lives in 2020, Blaine-Cruz shapes Wilder’s world so much that he embraces the experience of blacks and places it firmly in the history of humanity. Wilder. .

As usual, the skin of our teeth It opens with Sabina (Gabby Beans, terribly funny, especially when the character is broken to reveal another character below), a waitress at the Excelsior, New Jersey, of a family who moves over the Antrobuses. Sabina nervously tidies up the charming house and we all understand who and what she is: Mr. Entribus (James Vincent Meredith) has been very busy in the office lately, inventing the wheel while Mrs. Antribus. (Roslin Raff) takes care of the children, little Gladys (Page Gilbert), who has bad lipstick habits at school, and young Henry (Julian Robertson), who just can’t keep his hands off the rocks and the others. children. More skull than I can give his real name: Cain.

And best of all, Ice Age is headed to New Jersey and it’s not friendly.
They are likely to survive the grump that surrounds the living room, an amazing and huge hand-made doll designed by James Ortiz, or the orange mammoth that spins like a cub.

So they don’t. As in Act II, when the action and the Antrobus family meet aboard the Atlantic City, it appears that during the 1920s and the biblical flood, the mammoth and the dinosaur will not be among the two. I take shelter in that big ship off the Jersey coast. Abuser Henry continues to cause trouble, Sabina now calls herself Lily (as in Lilith the eternal temptress) and Mrs. Antrobus has it all under her husband’s shameful excuse, but hey, the family of the family, and this storm takes place. is preparing is coming. Heavy.

Whenever Კანი Finally moving on to the second act, the anthrobes were destroyed by the war (the blue and gray uniforms and the evening dresses leave no doubt about which war) and by the protracted but never resolved conflicts between father and son, husband and wife. Mother and daughter reach a climax and, Wilder suggests, a kind of balance that can only exist in forgiveness. The next problem is always coming up, so stop arguing.

Of course, except Wilder could not have imagined a nuclear holocaust or existential climate change. the skin of our teeth He always feels a little, well, weird about his old disasters and his good suggestions. As a theater, Lincoln Center’s staging impressively uses puppet and hurricane projections and the Atlantic City Trail as modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, which, by the way, sounds insanely funny. Fantastic people, especially an all-encompassing fortune teller, in a relatively short but perfectly imposing play by theater superstar Priscilla Lopez. With a beautiful final image, people wandering in the distant fields of the sun. There is hope that they will go where they are going, it has been a long walk.