The Skin of Our Teeth

[+ WilliamM]

Revival at Lincoln Center, performances beginning April 1. Play by Thornton Wilder.  About a family, including a maid, that have lived for centuries in Atlantic City.

The 1050s revival played Broadway and was famously broadcast live on television with:

George Abbott

Helen Hayes

Mary Martin

Don Murray

 

[+ Lucky]

I bought tickets to see Our Town at the South Coast Repertory Theater in May. While perusing their website, I learned things about Thornton Wilder:

It’s not exaggerating to call Thornton Wilder a Renaissance Man. Where to start chronicling his remarkable and varied career provides a challenge to anyone seeking to wrap their minds around how much Wilder (1897-1975) accomplished in his 78 years.

SCR commemorates the 125^th birthday of this Renaissance Man by producing his seminal work Our Town, which runs May 7-June 4 on the Segerstrom Stage. SCR is the only Southern California theatre producing one of Wilder’s works this year.

To commemorate Wilder’s 125^th birthday, more than 150 productions of his plays go on stage worldwide. This includes a new Broadway production of The Skin of Our Teeth and a first-ever staging of Wilder’s unfinished play The Emporium at Alley Theater in Houston. Along with that, the Thornton Wilder Library is releasing a new edition of The Bridge of San Luis Rey and special Thornton Wilder Library editions of all his novels and major plays.

On April 27, a short documentary, Thornton Wilder: It’s Time will premiere at Lincoln Center Theater, the site of the Broadway revival of The Skin of Our Teeth. That documentary, featuring rarely seen footage of Wilder, along with interviews with Mia Farrow, the late playwright A.R. Gurney and others, will be made available free online.

On Tuesday, May 3, the Library of America will host Our Town for Our Time: How Thornton Wilder’s Play Speaks to a changing America and Around the Globe. The online conversation, which features a conversation with theatre director Michel Hausmann, Sorbonne University professor Julie Vatain-Corfdi and Tappan Wilder, the author’s nephew and literary executor, is free. Register here.

The celebration of Wilder’s 125th birthday honors one of the most decorated men of letters of the 20th century. But Wilder was more than a playwright, more than a novelist.

There’s the three Pulitzer Prizes: two in Drama for Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth and one in Fiction for The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Wilder remains the only American writer to win Pulitzers in two different categories.There’s the proficiency in four languages. There’s the teaching career at the University of Chicago and Harvard. There’s the screenwriting career, where Wilder wrote the first draft of Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Shadow of a Doubt.

He wrote the libretto for Paul Hindemith’s The Long Christmas Dinner and Alcestiad by Louise Talma, which was based on Wilder’s play. And there’s the man who served his country as a decorated officer for the Army Air Force Intelligence Department during World War II.

Even Tappan Wilder finds himself running out of verbal real estate trying to encompass Wilder’s overall contribution to the arts.

 

“Wilder was a man of many parts: most people know him as a playwright and a novelist, but he was also an actor, translator, educator, lecturer, musician, lyricist, screenwriter, and the list goes on,” Wilder said. “Constantly experimenting with form, he wrestled with the questions of the cosmos, of what it means to be human. With the celebration of the 125^th anniversary of his birth, we’re putting him back together. It’s a moment to celebrate the depth and breadth of his work, as well as his legacy—his influence on the writers of today.”

 

[jeezifonly]

On 3/19/2022 at 9:30 AM, WilliamM said:

Revival at Lincoln Center, performances beginning April 1. Play by Thornton Wilder.  About a family, including a maid, that have lived for centuries in Atlantic City.

The 1050s revival played Broadway and was famously broadcast live on television with:

George Abbott

Helen Hayes

Mary Martin

Don Murray

 

What they must have gone through to preserve Kinescope from 1050-something.😉

[skynyc]

Saw this last night, a lavish production of a difficult play. Ahead of it's time for 1942, and not irrelevant today. the second act is a bit of a slog...garish and overlong (but it does evoke life before Noah's flood,) but with a jewel of a performance by Priscilla Lopez as the Fortune Teller. But the third act does redeem the evening. I don't think this play will be on Broadway again...audience was half full to start, and a third of that left at intermission. Interesting to see this 1942 Pulitzer winner two days after A Strange Loop the 2020 winner. Challenging theater must be part of the requirements. As a subscriber I had discount, great seats. And I am glad to have seen it, but don't recommend it to all, just those with a palate for allegory and nonsense. (But the dinosaur puppet itself in act 1 was almost worth the price of admission.) 

[+ WilliamM]

As to people leaving, perhaps a  well known actor or actress would have helped.

Tallulah Bankhead and Fredric March were in the original cast. And Vivien Leigh in London

Edited May 4, 2022 by WilliamM

[Marc in Calif]

On 5/4/2022 at 12:26 PM, WilliamM said:

As to people leaving, perhaps a  well known actor or actress would have helped.

Tallulah Bankhead and Fredric March were in the original cast. And Vivien Leigh in London

A production I saw many, many years ago in San Francisco featured the great Sada Thompson as Mrs. Antrobus.

She had played the same role in a star-studded 1983 live TV telecast, directed by Jack O'Brien, from the stage of the original Old Globe (San Diego) production. IMDB notes that this "was the first instance of a stage play being broadcast live on American public television."

The New York Times previewed the telecast here.