Review: THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH at A Noise Within

The Skin of Our Teeth is an astonishing production of the classic play at A Noise Within through September 29th.  It is insatiably alive with sharp-fanged wit, whimsical thoughtfulness, and improbable wonder.  The Skin of Our Teeth is audaciously satirical, but also earnest its incandescent meditation on the eternal human cycle of apocalypse and overindulgence.

There is genius writing from Thornton Wilder, who throws out the whole narrative playbook in this classic 1942 Pulitzer Prize-winning play.  Meta conversations happen with the stage manager, the actors, and even a dinosaur and a wooly mammoth.  The Skin of Our Teeth is ahead of its time, absurdist, postmodern, deconstructionist — and yet it all makes perfect sense. How often do you see something that makes you look, as if the first time, astonished, bemused, laughing, horrified, and joyous, at the entire human experiment?   

There is luminous work from A Noise Within.  A Noise Within is always an ambitious and interesting place, inspiring in its commitment to classics, which I love.  To me they are sometimes guilty of some artistic misfires here or there, leaning too hard into trendy updates or an SAT approach to classics that sucks the juice out of performances.  With The Skin of Our Teeth, however, A Noise Within achieves something conspicuously, improbably perfect.  The direction from Julia Rodriguez–Elliott and Geoff Elliott is penetrating, intellectual, explosive, and kaleidoscopic in its brilliance.  Performances are irresistible.

I left Pasadena (not my favorite place) in a kind of awe, a kind of slow-gestating elation, that lingered with me.  Words like “profound” and “momentous” can be overly applied to the point of flavorlessness, but here you need gargantuan, succulent, pungent words that can capture the way this production of The Skin of Our Teeth overpowers you.

Playwright Thorton Wilder completed The Skin of Our Teeth only weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941.  For a generation that had survived World War I and the Depression “by the skin of our teeth”, it was yet another entry into another apocalypse.  Now with a recent world-stopping plague and horrific wars raging on in the Middle East and in Europe, our spidey senses of end times and impending doom are perhaps a bit tingly.  We are the perfect audience at the perfect moment for this play.

The Skin of Our Teeth explores the cyclical nature of human history and something about the way that repetition is built into the very DNA of humanity, the same characters, conflicts, yearnings, discovery, survival, devastation, and epic f*ckups repeating themselves over and over again.   In The Skin of Our Teeth, history is not so much a moving forward or backward as an eternal circle, with the same family encountering everything from a new Ice Age to biblical floods to the father’s kidnapped concubine and post apocalyptic war zones.

Performances are improbably great and unforgettable across a large ensemble cast.

Ann Noble as Sabina is hilarious, acidic, devastatingly witty, and bombshell sexy, with megawatt charisma.  Noble steals the show from the moment she opens the first act as a gossipy maid.  As the fortune teller, Cassandra Marie Murphys delivers a brilliant performance, her sardonic, smoky, cynical, eerie voice filling the theatre with a kind of hypnotizing magic.

Another great performance comes from Frederick Stuart, who I loved in A Christmas Carol.  In fact, listening to Stuart’s glorious, rich diction and staggeringly great voice as the Narrator in last year’s A Christmas Carol was one of great delights of the season.  Here Stuart brings his sensitive, deeply felt, nuanced delivery and trademark voice to the rather unpleasant patriarch of The Skin of Our Teeth, Mr. Antrobus, making him into a sympathetic, dynamic, and layered character.

Trisha Miller was also sheer loveliness in A Christmas Carol and a bold, captivating feminist aviatrix in Shaw’s Misalliance.  Miller shines here in a very different role, showing off her range: the tender-hearted but tough matriarch Mrs. Antrobus who has survived her louse of a husband and loved and nurtured her children for a few thousand years and can survive another few thousand without blinking.   This is a powerhouse performance from Miller of rare tenderness, resilience, sacrifice, and grit.   As her son Henry, Christian Henley first has a charming sulky boyish playfulness that turns into a mischievous, disturbing violence and finally blooms into a deep and powerful and arresting rage at the end.  It’s a wildfire star turn that you don’t see coming.

Visually, this is a jaw-dropping production, with inspired, brilliant work from scenic designer Frederica Nascimento, costume designer Garry Lennon; wig and make up designer Tony Valdés.

As I much as I usually loathe projections and feel they are an over-used, unfortunate trend in theatre, the projections here work beautifully.  Gigantic glaciers appear in the front yard, biblical floods overwhelm a pleasure pier and we are immersed in the stars by the end.  This is a production that is gigantic in scope but never loses sight of its precise, evocative details.

Afterwards, in a talkback with the cast, Christian Henley shared powerfully that for him, The Skin of Our Teeth is much about the need for self-determination and how man’s ego can destroy society.  Amber Liekhus said that for her, The Skin of Our Teeth is about resilience, second and third chances, forgiveness, selflessness, and love of family above all else.  This is the kind of play that Kasey Mahaffy said that he and his husband could talk about for hours.  There is enough here to fuel a hundred rich conversations.

I know I will be thinking about this astounding A Noise Within production for some time to come.

Phtoos by Craig Schwartz

The Skin of Our Teeth runs at A Noise Within through September 29th.  A Noise Within is located at 3352 E Foothill Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91107. There is free parking behind the theatre at the Sierra Madre Villa Metro Parking Structure. You can get tickets by calling (626) 356–3100 or by clicking the button below:

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