The Antrobus family faces the weight of the world in The Seat of Our Pants at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)
THE SEAT OF OUR PANTS
Newman Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 7, $125
publictheater.org
Just because The Skin of Our Teeth won Wisconsin native Thornton Wilder his third Pulitzer Prize doesn’t mean the 1942 work isn’t a slog, dense with metaphor, festooned with oddball characters and bizarre scenarios, and obsessed with strange time-shifting interventions. I’ve seen two recent productions, an overstuffed mess at Lincoln Center in 2022 and an exemplary revival from TFANA in 2017, but even the latter required significant attention from the audience to sift through Wilder’s complex storytelling as he essentially shares a tale that is nothing less than an encapsulation of the survival of living creatures on this planet.
The quartet of Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green attempted to turn The Skin of Our Teeth into a musical but eventually abandoned the project, as did the trio of John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Joseph Stein. But now Obie-winning composer, bandleader, playwright, and librettist Ethan Lipton has taken on the challenge and delivered an exciting and fun, if still problematic, musical adaptation called The Seat of Our Pants, continuing at the Public’s Newman Theater through December 7.
The 160-minute show (with intermission) is divided into The Skin of Our Teeth’s usual three acts, the first during the Ice Age in Excelsior, New Jersey, complete with dinosaurs and humans getting along well; the second on the boardwalk in Atlantic City at a convention of the Ancient and Honorable Order of Mammals, Subdivision Humans; and the third back in Excelsior following a devastating war. Each act is introduced by an announcer (Andy Grotelueschen), singing with a mic stand and asking the audience to join in. He advises at the very beginning, “I want to tell you that the news is good / I want to shout it out in every neighborhood / But I can’t lie to you — although I had assumed I would / The world is ending, the world is ending.”
At the center of everything is the Antrobus family: the father (Shuler Hensley), a successful and important businessman; his wife (Ruthie Ann Miles), a kind and practical woman; and their two children, the promising Gladys (Amina Faye) and the less-than-promising Henry (Damon Daunno). Holding it all together is their maid, Lily Sabina (Micaela Diamond), who often addresses the stage manager and the audience directly, complaining about the play itself. When someone apparently misses a cue, Sabina repeats a key line, “Don’t forget — we made it through the recession-pandemic-wildfire-oligarchy by the seat of our pants. One more crisis like that and then where will we be?” Fitz, the stage manager, tells her to stretch it out because of technical issues, but Sabina is having none of it.
“I will not invent words for this show,” she argues. “I hate this show and every line in it. I don’t understand a word of it anyway — all about the troubles of the human race? Now there’s a subject for you. Besides, the author hasn’t decided whether it’s set back in the caves or in New Jersey today. And now some other guy’s added songs. Songs! Because that’s what it was missing.”
Humans and animals interact in New Jersey in inventive musical based on Thornton Wilder play (photo by Joan Marcus)
But it turns out that many of the songs, including “The World Is Ending,” “Sabina’s Suite,” “Stuff It Down Inside,” and “Ordinary Girl,” inject life into the narrative, accompanied by clever staging by director Leigh Silverman (Yellow Face, Grand Horizons), boisterous choreography by Sunny Min-Sook Hitt, witty orchestrations and arrangements by Daniel Kluger, Lee Jellinek’s gleeful, open set with the audience on two sides facing each other and the band on the other two sides, and costumes (by Kaye Voyce) that range from suburban casual to convention uniforms to a talking mammoth (Geena Quintos) and turkey (Bill Buell) duo to band outfits that match the flowery yellow wallpaper. The attention to detail in the costumes and the set changes are hilarious.
But, as Sabina repeated, “Don’t forget —” that this is based on The Skin of Our Teeth, so not everything makes sense, scenes go on too long, and there are too many songs. But watching the cast, led by wonderful performances by Grotelueschen (Into the Woods, Pericles) and Diamond (Parade, The Cher Show), having so much fun — even band member Allison Ann Kelly gets in on the action — is infectious.
I’m thinking that The Skin of Our Teeth is back in favor because of the current state of the country and the world amid wars, the immigration crisis, economic instability, political dysfunction, climate change, polarization, and general havoc and maelstrom. So why not turn it into a charming musical? Obie winner and Guggenheim fellow Lipton (We Are Your Robots, The Outer Space) has done just that.
“I am skin and bones, and I have escaped only by the skin of my teeth,” Job says in the Old Testament. With The Seat of Our Pants, we escape with much more.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]