THEATRE CHRONICLE
83
the master not home yet," says the maid, opening the play. In other
words,
if
George misses the five-fifteen, Chaos is come again. This is the
moral of the pieGe. Man, says Mr. Wilder, from time to time gets puffed
up with pride and prosperity, he grows envious, covetous, lecherous,
forgets his conjugal duties, goes whoring after women; portents of dis·
aster appear, but he is too blind to see them; in the end, with the help
of the little woman, who has never taken any stock in either pleasure or
wisdom, he escapes by the skin of his teeth.
Sicut erat in principia.
...
It is a curious view of life. It displays elements of Christian morality.
Christ, however, was never so simple, but on the contrary allowed always
for paradox (the woman taken in adultery, the story of Martha and
Mary, "Consider the lilies of the field") and indeed regarded the family
as an obstacle to salvation. No, it is not the Christian view, but a kind
of bowdlerized version of it, such as might have been imparted to a class
of taxpayer's children by a New England Sunday school teacher forty
years ago. And here we find again Mr. Wilder's perennial nostalgia, a
nostalgia not for the past but for an eternal childhood, for the bedrock
of middle-class family life, for
the old SundCDJ evenings at home with
the
tinkling piano our guide.
It is a nostalgia which found a pure and
lyrical expression in
Our Town,
·but which has made its way more fur·
tively into
The Skin of Our Teeth
and lurks there as an impediment
both to action and to thought, for at the end of each act the play hits
the suburban family group, stumbles over it, and comes to a halt; the
repetition is inevitable, but not dramatic: the only conflict is the conflict
between the submerged idea· and the form, and an encounter with an
iceberg is spectacular but neither comic nor tragic. The play in general
suffers from a certain embarrassment and uneasiness, as if its author were
ashamed of the seriousness with which he adheres to his theme. Surely
Miss Bankhead's asides to the audience and the whole conceit that the
end of the world is only a play that some actors are putting on serve
no other purpose than to relieve the author's sense of awkwardness. "I
don't understand a word of this play," Miss Bankhead complains again
and again, but actually there is not a word in the play which Miss Bank–
head cannot and does not perfectly comprehend. All this aspect of the
play is, to put it frankly, fraudulent, an illusionist's trick; an elaborate
system
of mystification has been, as it were, installed in the theater in
order to persuade the audience that it is witnessing a complex and diffi–
cult play, while what is really being shown on the stage is of a childish
and almost painful naivete. To some extent, the illusion is successful:
middlebrow members of the audience are, as usual, readily induced to
disregard the evidence of their own ears and consider the play either
monstrously profound or monstrously bewildering. Simpler people, how–
ever, who have never heard of Aristotle, see nothing difficult about it.
They accept the performance as a sort of lark, which at best it is, a
bright children's pantomime, full of boldly costumed figures out of Bible
history. As the daily drama critics have said, over and over, with all the
relish of Lucifer admitting a new registrant into hell, Mr. Wilder has
become a
real
man of the theater.
