Theatre Chronicle:
Chaos Is Come Again
Mary McCarthy
Thornton Wilder's latest play,
The Skin of Our Teeth,
is a spoof on
history. For all its air of experimentalism, its debt to Joyce, as yet
unacknowledged, its debt to Olsen and Johnson, paid in full, it belongs
to a tradition familiar and dear to the Anglo-Saxon heart. That is the
tradition of
The Road to Rome, Caesar and Cleopatra, Hamlet
in modern
dress,
Julius Caesar
in uniforms. Its mainspring is the anachronistic
joke, a joke both provincial and self-assertive, a joke which insists that
the Roman in his toga is simply a bourgeois citizen wearing a sheet, and
that Neanderthal man with his bear-skin and his club is at heart an
insurance salesman at a fancy-dress ball. The joke has a double fascina–
tion which it exerts on the middle·class public and the middle-class play·
wright alike. In the first place, it is conservative: it affirms the eternity
of capitalism, which it identifies with "human nature," and it consoles
us for the flatness of the present by extending that flatness over the past,
so that, whatever our sufferings, we shall at least not be racked by envy,
that most dangerous of human passions. In the second place, it is sacri·
legious, for it denies time and history, and this, to the modern ear,
is
the moral equivalent of
hubris,
of ancestor-desecration, of the sin against
the Holy Ghost. Hence it is that such works as
The Skin of Our Teeth
almost invariably have an appearance of daring: the shock value of
The Private Life of Helen of Troy,
say, did not derive from its rather
mild sexual impropriety. Moreover, art and culture generally find them·
selves within easy range of the blasphemer (and this is only logical,
since culture is an historical phenomenon); you get Mark Twain or
Mr. Wilder's third act where the philosophers appear as half-audible
quotations from their works, quotations which can only be introduced
after a great deal of. apologetic discussion: "I don't suppose it means
anything," says the stage·manager. "It's just a kind of poetic effect."
Mr. Wilder, being a professor, wants to have it both ways: he wants the
philosophers, but at the same time he does not want the audience to
think that he is an ass.
The plot and structure of
The Skin of Our Teeth
must by this time
be in the public domain. Everybody knows that the play deals with
three great crises in human history, the return of the Ice Age, the Flood,
the War, any war at all or this war in particular. It is Mr. Wilder's
fancy that all these events happened to a man named George Antrobus
of 216 Cedar Street, Excelsior, New Jersey, father of two, president of
the Ancient Order of Mammals, inventor, soldier and occasional phil·
anderer. Man, then, enlightened ape, is seen as the eternal husband,
whose destiny is an endless commuter's trip between the Home and the
Office, the poles of the human sphere. The trip may not be broken on
pain of flood, ice, fascism; a stopover with the Other Woman will result
m a disaster of millenia! proportions. "Oh, oh, oh! Six o'clock and
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