360° SERIES VIEWFINDER: FACTS AND PERSPECTIVES ON THE PLAY, PLAYWRIGHT, AND PRODUCTION WWW.TFANA.ORG TABLE OF CONTENTS The Plays 4 Perspectives 7 Dialogues: Foreward to The Skin of Our Teeth by Paula Vogel 12 TheSkin Journals of Thornton Wilder The Playwright 18 Biography: Thornton Wilder 19 "A Most Important Broadcast": ThorntonWilder, Eleanor Roosevelt & the Election of 1940 The Production 21 Interview: Backwards to the Future Arin Arbus in conversation with Alisa Solomon 31 Cast and Creative Team About Theatre For a New Audience 40 Mission and Programs 41 Major Supporters The Skin of Our Teethis sponsored by Endowment support for The Skin of Our Teeth is provided by The Howard Gilman Foundation Fund for Classic Drama. Notes Front Cover Art designed by Milton Glaser, Inc. This Viewfinder will be periodically updated with additional information. Last updated February 2017 Credits “Perspectives” edited by Jonathan Kalb. "Preface to Three Plays" by Thornton Wilder. Copyright©1957 by Thornton Wilder. Reprinted by arrangement with The Wilder Family LLC and The Barbara Hogenson Agency, Inc. All rights reserved. Paula Vogel's "Foreward to The Skin of Our Teeth" originally published in The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder, published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics (2003). Reprinted by arrangement with the author. "Biography" of Thornton Wilder provided by A. Tappan Wilder. The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939-1961, Selected and Edited by Donald Gallup, published by Yale University Press. Copyright©1985 by The Wilder Family LLC. Reprinted by arrangement with The Wilder Family LLC and The Barbara Hogenson Agency, Inc. All rights reserved. "A Most Important Broadcast" excerpts a pamphlet, "Prominent Writers' Statements of Why They Are For Franklin D. Roosevelt." Thanks to A. Tappan Wilder for passing along this gem from his collection. Eleanor Roosevelt "My Day" columns (3/2/1938 and 11/30/1942) courtesy of The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Digital Edition (2008), accessed 2/27/2017. The Skin of Our Teeth360° | Edited by Literary & Humanities Manager Peter Cook | Literary Advisor: Jonathan Kalb | Council of Scholars Chair: Richard McCoy | Research Assistance by Literary & Humanities Intern Madeline Pages Designed by: Milton Glaser, Inc. | Copyright 2017 by Theatre for a New Audience. All rights reserved. With the exception of classroom use by teachers and individual personal use, no part of this Viewfinder may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Some materials published herein are written especially for our guide. Others are reprinted by permission of their authors or publishers. 2 THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE 360° SERIES 360° VIEWFINDER THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH . Photo by Henry Grossman. by Photo . The Skin of Our Teeth Our Skin of The Kecia Lewis, Kimber Monroe and David Rasche in Theatre for a New Audience's production of Audience's production New for a Rasche in Theatre and David Lewis, Kecia Kimber Monroe . Photo by Gerry by Photo Goodstein. The Skin of Our Teeth Our Skin of The The company of Theatre for a New Audience's production of Audience's New for a The company of Theatre THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH 3 THE PLAY PERSPECTIVES Thornton Wilder as Mr. Antrobus in a production ofThe Skin of Our Teethin summer stock, 1947 Courtesy of the Wilder Family LLC and the Yale Collection of American Literature, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The following quotes are selected perspectives on the plays from notable scholars and artists. “‘What’s it all about?’ a man complained to his wife. ‘Why, George,’ she said. ‘It’s about love and hate and passion and everything—ever since the world began.’ ‘Well,’ the man said, ‘There must be more to it than that.’” Elia Kazan, director, Broadway premiere of The Skin of Our Teeth, overhearing a couple on opening night (A Life, 1988) “The novel is pre-eminently the vehicle of the unique occasion, the theater of the generalized one. It is through the theater’s power to raise the exhibited individual action into the realm of idea and type and universal that it is able to evoke our belief. But power is precisely what those nineteenth-century audiences did not — dared not — confront. They tamed it and drew its teeth; squeezed it into that removed showcase. They loaded the stage with specific objects, because every concrete object on the stage fixes and narrows the action to one moment in time and place.... When you emphasize place in the theater, you drag down and limit and harness time to it. You thrust the action back into past time, whereas it is precisely the glory of the stage that it is always ‘now’ there.... No great age in the theater ever attempted to capture the audience’s belief through this kind of specification and localization.... I began writing one-act plays that tried to capture not verisimilitude but reality.” Thornton Wilder, "Preface to Three Plays" (1957) “We should see [Wilder] clearly, in all his complexity. His is no more a caustic pessimistic perspective than it is a sentimental optimistic one. Ironically, staunchly anti-realistic in his method, he is probably more realistic in his attitude towards the human condition than many a more traditionally realistic playwright.” Jackson R. Bryer, “Thornton Wilder at 100: His Achievement and His Legacy” (1999) 4 THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE 360° SERIES THE PLAY PERSPECTIVES “I am searching for a new form in which there will be a perpetual counterpoint between the detailed episode of daily life—the meal, the chat, the courtship and the funeral—and the ever-present references to geological time and a distant future for the millions of people who have repeated these moments.” Thornton Wilder, from a 1939 New York Times interview with John Franchey "In America the family is the nexus of an unusually powerful ambivalence.” Thornton Wilder, Norton Lectures (1951-52) “Thornton Wilder was an entrepreneur of the ordinary and the extraordinary . who considered himself the poet laureate of the family. Where the other major playwrights turned psychology into behavior, Wilder turned philosophy into playfulness. Wilder’s themes were optimism, not pessimism; exhilaration, not alienation; compassion, not corruption; the spirit, not cynicism. The scope of Wilder’s acquaintances was as great as the breadth of his knowledge. He took tea with Sigmund Freud, roller-skated with Walt Disney; hiked the alps with the world heavy-weight-boxing champion Gene Tunney; worked on a Hollywood thriller with Alfred Hitchcock; and befriended and collaborated with Gertrude Stein.” John Lahr, Introduction to the forthcoming Penguin Classics Collected Works of Thornton Wilder “Two of Thornton Wilder’s plays have in them moments which always bring me to tears (I am not an easy one to cry, by the way) and not only in performance but in reading and even just in thinking about them. There is the moment in The Skin of Our Teeth when Mrs. Antrobus, during the cataclysmic storm calls out to her son, for the first time using his real name: ‘Cain! Cain!’ And there is the moment in Our Town when Emily, returning from the dead, stands in the family kitchen as a teenage girl—invisible, unheard—on the day of her birthday, and hears her father coming down the stairs, saying, joyfully: ‘Where’s my girl!? Where’s my birthday girl!?’ There: I did it again; I started to choke up as I wrote that sentence.” Edward Albee, letter to Jackson R. Bryer (1997) “Wilder occupies a unique position, between the Great Books and Parisian sophistication one way, and the entertainment industry the other way, and in our culture this region, though central, is a dark and almost uninhabited no man’s land.” Francis Fergusson, “Three Allegorists: Brecht, Wilder, and Eliot” (1956) “The as yet unwritten fourth act of my tragicomedy The Skin of Our Teeth would deal with the painful lessons man still has to learn in the process of adapting scientific and technological advances to the demands of freedom, dignity and the ultimate destiny of mankind. Despite everything, I am still an optimist, even though in that work I put a damper on the straightforward belief in technical and material progress just as much as on the pessimism of the prophets of ultimate doom.” Wilder, from a 1953 interview THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH 5 THE PLAYS PERSPECTIVES “In Wilder’s nervy negotiation with life, humor was essential, a form of non-friction that banished gravity, an attack on what weighed him down. ‘All that ignoble passion to be didactic that I have to fight with. All that bewilderment as to where Moral Attitude begins and where it shades off into mere Puritan Bossiness,’ he wrote to Chauncey Tinker, Yale’s distinguished Sterling Professor of English. On stage and off, humor was a strategy that kept the world both at attention and at arm’s length. Wilder preached the tactic of detachment that he practiced in his great plays. ‘The chief thing I want you to learn to do is laugh, to understand these things with laughter,’ he wrote.” John Lahr, Penguin Introduction “We know too much nowadays. Our imagination is oppressed by memory, by the knowledge of a hundred thousand details of history, by a tangle of private stories which rose to the surface with the help of psychoanalysis. It will take decades, maybe centuries, before the artistic creator and his audience, which really should also participate in the creative process, can free themselves from the avalanche of figures and happenings, which keeps on growing through the mass of daily news.