At MET, The Skin of Our Teeth finds humor and hope in the human trek

Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre doesn’t typically shy from challenging, lengthy, large-cast productions, and its latest project, Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Skin of Our Teeth, ranks high in the small company’s win column.

It’s a daunting bit of canon — three acts, in such symbolic settings as the Ice Age, the Great Flood and Tomorrow. Wilder wrote the play during wartime, in 1942, with no theme in mind smaller than the survival of the human race. Yet Skin is far from ponderous, a quirky show steeped in satire and farce. I wasn’t sure at first what to make of the preview I attended, but shifted from an uncertain What? in Act 1 to complete absorption by Act 2. In the play’s final movement, I was wholly in its grasp.

Under Bob Paisley’s tidy, adept direction, two 45-minute acts and a shorter third keep a tight pace, and the 19-member cast clicks with an orchestrated energy and movement that propel the play forward. The story begins in the suburban Excelsior, New Jersey, home of the Antrobus family (recall that anthropos is the Greek word meaning “human being”). “We came through the Depression by the skin of our teeth, that’s true. One more tight squeeze like that and where will we be?” asks Lily Sabina (Ellen Kirk), the Antrobus maid, at the start.

It’s August but “the coldest day of the year.” There’s unconfirmed news that a wall of ice is moving down from Canada, and “dogs are sticking to the sidewalks.” Freezing refugees gather outside, including Homer (looking here like a cross between Roy Orbison and a Beat poet) and Moses (Kevin Fewell), plus a dinosaur and a woolly mammoth. All seek food and warmth; both are in short supply. Sabina and a worried Maggie Antrobus (Teri Adams) and the Antrobus children, Henry and Gladys (Kyle Dyck and Alice Pollack), await the safe arrival of George Antrobus (Scott Cox), who’s at the office creating the alphabet and the wheel, among other inventions, and who advises his wife to keep warm by burning “everything except Shakespeare.”

“We can do without reading or writing,” Maggie says. “We can’t do without food.”

“Then let the ice come,” George replies.

This isn’t the same kind of family Wilder wrote in Our Town, just a few years before. There’s a Stage Manager here, too (Andy Penn), but he’s a problem-solver rather than a guide. George and Maggie Antrobus, married 5,000 years, are Everyman and Everywoman, Adam and Eve. A stand-in for our brutal side, Henry, whose name they changed from Cain, has killed his brother and possibly others. “All of us, we’re covered with blood,” George says.

Act 2 takes us to a convention of “the Ancient and Honorable Order of Mammals, Subdivision Humans,” where a furiously rising storm, partying attendees (looking like Shriners), a fortune teller (Donette Coleman) and Miss Atlantic City (Kirk’s Sabina, a take on the mythological temptress Lilith) intertwine biblical allusion and the absurd at full tilt. But Skin isn’t all happy-hour. In the unconventional Act 3, the players are at the close of a long, consuming war, seeking to start over again.

As the show’s central force, Cox skillfully shifts from thundering to reflective to comically nuanced in his portrayal of George, while Adams’ Maggie keeps an appropriately even keel as the staunch, supportive partner and protective mother. Dyck’s active but
borderline-controllable boy is a little bit scary, simmering with an aggression that has particular resonance later in the play. And as Sabina, Kirk sparkles with vivacity and charisma, lending an authority that helps anchor this show. (The other cast members, in supporting and ensemble roles, do good work, including Penn, Pollack, Coleman and Fewell.)

In spite of its big-canvas themes — philosophical, literary, biblical — this play is more pointillist than broad strokes. And sudden breaks of the fourth wall, in which actors talk about their characters and the play itself, help ground Skin‘s ideas. Paisley has inserted both local and more recent references to keep the work timely (though we humans are never really without crises and conflicts that threaten).

It all works. The Skin of Our Teeth is no graduate seminar or museum piece. It feels surprisingly personal. We are, after all, a piece of this story, a part of this family.