The Skin Of Our Teeth Reviews
The New York Times- Recommended
"..."The Skin of Our Teeth" is a big play. It has to be. The whole of humanity doesn't fit tidily into three acts, even assuming as much frame-breaking foolery as Wilder allows. In Blain-Cruz's maximalist hands, it gets even bigger, the stage overflowing with flowers and lights and dazzling, playful puppetry. She favors a high femme aesthetic - luxuriant, Instagrammable - and no other serious director working now has such a profound interest in visual pleasure and delight. She also has a killer playlist (Rihanna, Dua Lipa). Because this is the way the world ends: all bangers, no skips."
NY Daily News- Somewhat Recommended
"...And there you have the problem with Lileana Blain-Cruz's epic Lincoln Center revival, an admirably imaginative treatment of the play that alas does much too little to find a way in for its audience."
Vulture- Highly Recommended
"...If the only thing you know about Thornton Wilder is his masterpiece Our Town, then his other Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Skin of Our Teeth, is going to come as a shock. You will show up at Lincoln Center anticipating restrained aesthetics (will they have a ladder, or just mime one?) and the purity of a secular hymn. You might have even packed a hankie for the sad parts. And then - probably around the same time the 15-foot-tall dinosaur walks in - you'll realize something's up."
New York Theater- Highly Recommended
"...So "The Skin of Our Teeth" is a timely play. It is also an acclaimed play: It won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It's an influential play; its innovative theatrical tricks and techniques were echoed in later works by dramatists as disparate and distinct as Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett and Caryl Churchill; it is arguably a prime example of absurdist theater created ten years before The Theater of the Absurd. It's an important play. But the main reason to see the new Broadway revival of it is because it's fun."
Variety- Somewhat Recommended
"...Thornton Wilder's allegorical play "The Skin of Our Teeth" is bizarre, abstract and convoluted; it's not to be taken seriously. Or so Sabina (Gabby Beans) tells the audience at Lincoln Center Theater's Broadway revival of the 1942 Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Thornton Wilder. But don't listen to her: There are definitely things to take seriously here, as the themes of this 80-year-old work, courageously but unevenly directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, remain relevant and vital to be reckoned with by contemporary audiences."
New York Post- Somewhat Recommended
"..."The Skin of Our Teeth" is trotted out every so often by theaters that wish to inform us that the writer of "Our Town" also wrote other plays, like Shakespeare festivals and "The Two Noble Kinsmen." The points Wilder makes - that family life is a universal constant and that peaceful periods are inevitably followed by some natural disaster or geopolitical strife - are roughly the same as those of "Our Town," only less emotionally true and more self-indulgent and pretentious."
Time Out New York- Recommended
"...I'm not sure that any revival of The Skin of Our Teeth can really work anymore. But for theater lovers, this one offers a rare chance to see Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning curiosity as an all-out extravaganza, with nearly 30 actors-the always superb Roslyn Ruff is a standout-and a vividly imaginative staging. Blain-Cruz does her best to keep the audience engaged with a host of video and scenic effects, and the designers-Adam Rigg (set), Montana Levi Blanco (costumes), Yi Zhao (lighting), Palmer Hefferan (sound), Hannah Wasileski (projections)-more than pull their weight. No one but Lincoln Center would do this for such a difficult, arguably unstageable play; it's like an Encores! production on a massive scale. Again: There's a dinosaur! Perhaps this is a case of theater makers so preoccupied with whether or not they could revive The Skin of Our Teeth, they didn't stop to think if they should revive it. But as vexing as the show sometimes is, I'm glad that they did."
The Wrap- Not Recommended
"...The current Broadway season has offered a few good revivals of plays and a couple of great revivals: Paul Vogel's "How I Learned to Drive" and Ruben Santiago-Hudson's "Lackawanna Blues." That winning streak ended on Monday with the opening of "The Skin of Our Teeth" at Lincoln Center Theater's Vivian Beaumont."
Deadline- Recommended
"...Except of course that Wilder couldn't have imagined nuclear holocaust or existential climate change, so The Skin of Our Teeth is always going to feel a bit, well, quaint in its ancient disasters and feel-good proposals. As theater, the Lincoln Center staging makes impressive use of the puppetry and the projections of hurricanes and a gorgeous evocation of the Atlantic City boardwalk as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah - which, by the way, looks like terrific fun, with loads of cool people, not least the all-knowing fortune teller played, in a relatively brief but wonderfully commanding performance, by the great stage star Priscilla Lopez. In a lovely final image, human wanderers follow the sun through distant fields. Here's hoping they get where they are going - it's been a long hike."
TheaterMania- Somewhat Recommended
"...The show does go on - and so does life, despite coronaviruses, wars, and natural disasters: That's the main theme of Wilder's epic theatricalized comic strip of human history, and Lileana Blain-Cruz (making her directorial Broadway debut) has captured that timely theme in one of the most eye-popping, visually captivating productions you'll see this season. Featuring a news-reel-playing movie screen that looks big enough for an IMAX theater (stunning projections by Hannah Wasileski), an enormous Atlantic City boardwalk scene with a slide that descends dizzyingly from the flies (extraordinary set design by Adam Rigg), and impressive woolly mammoth and talking dinosaur puppets, The Skin of Our Teeth is a wild ride, even if it is a bumpy one at times."
TheaterScene.net- Somewhat Recommended
"...You would think that at the tail end of a pandemic Thornton Wilder's 1943 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Skin of Our Teeth would be the perfect play for our moment. This experimental play which pays tribute to the resilience of the human race offers hope in time of adversity. The experimental nature of the play uses techniques promulgated by James Joyce, Luigi Pirandello and Bertolt Brecht, none of which are so new or unfamiliar anymore: actors addressing the audience directly and stepping out of character, anachronistic events or references, etc."
NY Theatre Guide- Recommended
"...The Skin of Our Teeth seems to find its footing in Act III, in a quiet moment free from distraction, when Mr. Antrobus (James Vincent Meredith, who struggles with Wilder's stylized dialogue) says to his wife, "Maggie, we've come a long ways. We've learned. We're learning." As this production of The Skin of Our Teeth progresses, hopefully those working on it will learn to trust in the text, and be less reliant on bells, whistles, and dinosaurs."
Theater Pizzazz- Recommended
"...The production, one of spectacle and moment, whimsy and humor is acutely directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz for maximum effect. It succeeds in various instances, to be poignant and profound as the Antrobus family (James Vincent Meredith-Dad, Roslyn Ruff-Mom, Julian Robertson-Henry, Paige Gilbert-Gladys) and their maid Sabina (Gabby Beans)-one of the narrators who breaks the fourth wall to address the audience-claw their way through history to survive. These "everymen" and "every women" archetypes experience representative cataclysms, all the while confronting the questions about the human race and their place in history until the end of time."
StageZine- Somewhat Recommended
"...Thornton Wilder's 1942 Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Skin of Our Teeth was last revived on Broadway in 1955. It has not been produced in 67 years for numerous reasons. The epic is not nearly as accessible or universal as Our Town and is thorny and awkward in nature. The story is a three-act saga of the ultimate survival of humanity and the Androbus family, married for 5,000 years and living in Excelsior, New Jersey. The story takes us from the Ice Age to Atlantic City in the 1920s to the end of an unspecified war and is convoluted indeed. It touches on everything from the Bible to technology to natural disasters and the environment."
Daily Beast- Recommended
"...The play similarly ricochets between riotous comedy and depth-searching drama-the war-scarred third act has nowhere to go but down. But even towards the end, the play stops itself early in its establishment of gloom to introduce us to new actors, because others have allegedly come down with what seems like food poisoning. Wilder loves taking a pin to his own seriousness."
The Observer- Recommended
"...Looking at the big picture, this gorgeous monster of a production brings together two urgent trends in theatrical discourse today: casting reparations by creating Black space in the white canon and also, embracing a sprawling meta-drama that feeds a hunger for stories that are not merely sociological but cosmological. We know that patriarchy, greed, and white supremacy have spawned misery across ages; without pretending they have the solution, theater artists can find deep bass strings of commonality to pluck. For me, The Skin of Our Teeth is a boisterous hymn to humanity, the most moving and inspiring work of the season."
Broadway News- Highly Recommended
"..."The Skin of Our Teeth" has skin in the game as one of the most groundbreaking plays in American history. It demands you take an unserious look at the most serious threats to our survival. While all of that existential meaning and non-meaning can send your brain on a roller-coaster ride - the morning after seeing the show I felt hungover - the exceptionality of this Broadway production makes it well worth the price of admission."
Theatrely- Highly Recommended
"...No matter. The overall achievement of this staging is still titanic, both for its wrangling with an impossible play and its pushing forward of a theater defined by traditions. One can feel the struggle of a creative team (all making LCT debuts, except Blain-Cruz) boldly willing the dried-up gears of an aging apparatus to move in new, exciting ways. Like Wilder's play, the ultimate achievement is messy, imperfect, and seminal."
New York Stage Review- Highly Recommended
"...I have seen many fine productions of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth. But I can say without hesitation that the current revival at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, under the direction of Lileana Blain-Cruz, is the most creative, most emotionally connected, and most urgent staging of the 1943 Pulitzer Prize winner I have ever encountered, or hope to encounter."