MASSCULT
AND
MIDCULT
607
.Q():w
to Jlse
th~
modem idiom in the
s(!fVic~of .
the .banal. Their.
authors \Vere
all
expa,tri'ltes in the 'twenties:-eve.n .Mr.
~Qe~,.
'rh9 dates '
his.
Americapesque epic "Neuilly-s.ur-S_ei.ne, .
1928.'.'.
That they arj! not conscious of any shifting of gears, that:
th~y
still ·think of themselves as avant-gardists is just what makes
their later works so attractive in a Midcult sense. "Toward the
end of the 'twenties I began to lose pleasure in going to the
theater," Mr. Wilder begins the preface to the
1957
edition of
Three Plays.
He explains that, while Joyce, Proust and Mann
still compelled .his belief, the theater didn't, and he. continues:
'~.I
began to feel that the theater was not only inadequate;
it
was evasive; it did not wish to draw on its deeper potentiali–
ties. ... It aimed to be
soothing.
The tragic had no heat; the
G~mic
had no bite; the social criticism failed to indict us with
responsibility. I began to search for the point where the theater
had run off the track, where it had . . . become a ' minor
art
and an inconsequential diversion." That point, he found, was
"the box-set stage," with its realistic sets and props and its
proscenium dividing the actors from the audience. He fixed
that,
all
right, but the plays he mounted on his advanced stage
were evasive, soothing, without tragic heat or comic bite and
spectacularly without social criticism.
The Skin of Our Teeth,
for instance, is as vast in theme as
Our Town
is modest, dealiilg
with the whole history of the human race, but its spirit and its
dialogue are equally folksy, and its point, hammered home by
the maid, Sabina, is identical: life goes on and, to lapse into
the idiom of Sabina's opposite number in
Our Town,
there
ain~t
a thing you can do about it. "This is where you came in," she
says
at the final curtain. "We have to go on for ages and ages
yet. You go home. The end of this play isn't written yet. Mr.
and Mrs. Antrobus! Their heads are full of plans and they're as
confident as the first day they began." A soft impeachment–
but Midcult specializes in soft impeachments. Its cakes are for–
ever eaten, forever intact.
.The Skin of Our Teeth
was first produced in
1942,
at
