"'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."
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"For a play about the end of the world, there’s also a surprising lack of tension here. 'The Skin of Our Teeth' shouldn’t just feel like the apocalypse; it should also feel like a theatre troupe putting a play together that keeps going haywire, where a strong wind could knock the production off its axis at any moment. And like their characters, the actors must persevere by, well, the skin of their teeth."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Wilder’s overriding message—and 'The Skin of Our Teeth' certainly contains many a pointed message, particularly in its heavily moralistic final act—is that it is always too late for humanity to save itself, and yet it is never too late. Through an ice age, a world-leveling flood and a brutal war, the Antrobus clan perseveres, occasionally succumbing to despondency but somehow being reborn in hope, with the lodestars of the great philosophers offering solace and inspiration. "
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"Lincoln Center Theater’s major new revival of the play, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, with additional material by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the tireless efforts of an exemplary cast, does, in fact, afford some newfound vitality for a work so often more admired than loved. "
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"The events of the play are chaotic, but in this production they connect to the chaos of the here and now in ways that left me bewildered and a little frazzled. ... Living through rising temperatures, pollution, a global pandemic and an unjustifiable war in the Ukraine didn’t help me find resonance in the play’s nebulous plot or broad philosophical themes."
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"Today, no less than in 1942, we have to take a breath and acknowledge that Wilder is taking big, prophetic swings in the theater: intercutting the sort of family tragedy Arthur Miller had yet to write with miracle plays from five centuries previous, spiced with quotes from the Bible, the Iliad, Aristotle and other philosophers. Coming out of a pandemic, in a politicized theater environment, one cannot understate how refreshing it is to see a play that thinks big about the long arc of world history with Wilder’s blend of whimsy and pessimism."
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