Thornton among the dinosaurs

I don't often catch student efforts, but I was intrigued by BU's recent production (it closed last weekend) of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, an extravaganza seen about as often as the prehistoric fauna that romp through its first act.  Indeed, I've only seen the script fully mounted once before, almost thirty years ago - for reasons obvious (mammoths and dinosaurs are required, along with a tidal wave and a glacier) and not-so-obvious (more on that later). In short, it's the kind of script you almost have to turn to students these days to see at all; and so its appearance at BU felt like the perfect cap to a local season largely given over to Wilder on stages both large (the award-winning Our Town) and small (the intriguing Little Giants).

Alas, the production (directed by BU éminence grise Sidney Friedman) slightly disappointed - which probably shouldn't have surprised me. On Broadway, it's true, it was a hit, but that was during wartime (it's about crisis, and depends on a crisis atmosphere) and with people like Tallulah Bankhead, Frederic March, and Montgomery Clift in the leads. Not that the kids at BU weren't talented - they were. But only two actors were exactly right for their roles, and others went wrong in ways that made me wonder if the culture isn't closed off to much of Wilder's curious meditation on human history.

There is, of course, a sense of timelessness hanging over his biggest success, Our Town - and questions of divine purpose likewise loom over the novel that put him on the map, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Wilder clearly had his eye on the long view (even the juvenilia of Little Giants hinted as much) and hence the cyclical "plot" of The Skin of Our Teeth stretches for eons, and mashes together the Ice Age, Noah's Flood, and World War II with something like the arch tone of a caveman cartoon in The New Yorker (or, if your prefer upper-lowbrow to lower-highbrow, an episode of The Flintstones).


This tells you that in one way Wilder's concept is almost too simple: he follows the travails of the archetypal Antrobus family (anthropology + omnibus, get it?) as they encounter the threats to human existence that have recurred in various forms throughout history. But as if self-conscious about the artifice of this gambit, the author embeds his action in a welter of postmodern frames, breaks "the fourth wall" repeatedly, and finishes off the whole thing with a direct lift from Finnegans Wake (the audience is supposed to exit the theatre as the play returns to the top of its cycle, to continue on forever, like the dreams of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker).

If all these high-low/low-high cultural contrasts sound like too much for the bookwormish Wilder to bring off - well, there are many who agree with you. But I have a soft spot in my heart for The Skin of Our Teeth, probably because in its modern-lite way it treats questions that few dramatists have ever attempted to answer - the persistence of human evil probably being first among them (the Antrobus scion, Henry, was formerly known as Cain - so you know what happened to his elder brother). Indeed, I'd argue that beneath the script's Thurber-ish surface, there are very dark (and yes eternal) conflicts roiling; the trick for any production is to suggest them beneath all Wilder's parlor-game wit and twee quotation.

And at least two of the Boston University actors managed to do just that. Lorne Batman made a polished, genteelly steely Mrs. Antrobus (although she could have hinted at even more ferocity when saving the bad seed in her brood). And as Cain/Henry, Sam Tilles found a believable arc from spoiled, impulsive brat to - well - Hitler. Wilder's other conceptions of human character seemed to confound the young cast, however. His Mr. Antrobus - inventor of the wheel, serial adulterer, and silent mourner of the lost Abel - is built of a long series of suppressions, culminating in something close to despair, but there was little sympathy for (or comprehension of) his slow-burning fuse at BU. Likewise the author's polyglot temptress, Lily Sabina - whose name derives from two competing legends of femininity, the sexual demon Lilith, and the rape victims known as the Sabine women - seemed to flummox the relentlessly sex-positive mindset of the cast. To them, the very idea that sexual temptation could be a dishonest snare seemed alien, and apparently director Friedman didn't know what to do about that.

Of course perhaps the eternally closeted Wilder is himself a dinosaur - wrong about sex, as well as the nature of men and women (certainly his "timeless" domestic arrangements seem quite dated). Then again, perhaps modernity is in denial regarding a few basic facts about the species, and we ignore Wilder's wisdom at our peril (certainly the climate change crisis is reminiscent of his Ice Age scenario). At any rate, the production did showcase some outstanding, resourceful design by BU students. Costumer Chelsea Kerl actually pulled off a winsome dinosaur and mammoth (amusingly mimed by Zoe Silberblatt and Grace Woodward), and Courtney Nelson imaginatively evoked not only the collapsing Antrobus homestead, but also Atlantic City avant le déluge, and even the war-torn Western Front, helped immensely by Katy Atwell's lighting and Yi-Chun Hung's sound. Clearly if the cultural cycle ever returns to The Skin of Our Teeth, the technical talent is out there to put Wilder's vision over.

Where the Wilder things are

Photo: Cotton Talbot-Minkin

Matthew Woods and his Imaginary Beasts are without question the most daring theatrical programmers in the city - and maybe the world.  Indeed, Woods seems innately averse to the known theatrical quantity; he has an almost relentless taste for the obscure - I can't think of anything I've seen by the Beasts (aside from their winter pantos) that has been anything less than a rarity.  A typical Beasts season will lean heavily on Gertrude Stein, or Witkacy, or Meyerhold - and not even on their best-known stuff.

It sounds like a formula for commercial suicide; and certainly the Beasts aren't yet packing in houses. But like many on the intellectual edge of the fringe, they have slowly built a following, largely because despite the incredible range of his projects, Woods finds in all of them a mirror of his own eccentric perspective.

Indeed, next to Woods, just about every director in Boston looks hopelessly derivative.  He may be the Hub's only theatrical original, and certainly the only local director whose work depends utterly on a literal vision: in a Woods show, the movement, staging, costumes and lighting coalesce with a rare unity. But how to describe the ethos at their core?  For an Imaginary Beasts production is indeed a curious thing; the tone is whimsical, but its underpinning is strict; the atmosphere is usually one of surreal, magically sublimated innocence, like that of a forgotten daydream from childhood - but a sense of formal inquiry always moves beneath the sophisticated "simplicity" of the action.  Lewis Carroll and Gertrude Stein; puppetry and nursery rhymes and pantomime; these are the lodestars of Woods and the Imaginary Beasts.

A portrait of the artist as a young man.

So it's no surprise that Woods' style would find a haunting resonance with the "playlets" of Thornton Wilder, who was the gay offspring of a raging Calvinist father, a teetotaler who described his second son as "the last word in high browism; a delicate, girl-playing, aesthetic lad . . . hopeless." Looking at Wilder's prim college-age self (at left), you don't doubt the accuracy of that assessment.  But they said the same thing about Proust, didn't they; and somehow both dreamy queens contributed something unforgettable to our literature.

You can feel that contribution gestating in "Little Giants," Woods' bestiary of some of Wilder's juvenilia (as well as a piece or two from the end of his life, which I guess count as senilia). The production wraps this weekend at the Boston Center for the Arts, and its enchantments are well worth a last-minute look, particularly for those curious about the mind behind the classic Our Town.

Judging from the evidence here, that mind was drawn (as Woods and the Beasts are) to the art of sublimation - as well as the sublimations of art. Those who have noted the strict denial of sex and other dark temptations in Our Town will be unsurprised to find the sensual impulse is relentlessly transmuted here into chastely florid musings on the likes of "Childe Roland" and Pietro di Cosimo (whose twisty imagery Woods has tapped for his publicity). Death and Mozart, mermaids and "leviathans," dark towers and young heroes fill scene after scene; you can tell much of this fantasy was dreamt up at Oberlin and Yale, but that doesn't compromise the poignant yearning informing it.  A prissy young man who writes of a lonely mermaid longing for a seaman is not too difficult to psychoanalyze, it's true; but that doesn't make these fables any less beguiling. A Wilder scholar might also be intrigued by the glimmers of later gambits that surface in the texts (I felt I glimpsed motifs from The Matchmaker and The Skin of Our Teeth), but what lingered the longest with this particular reviewer was Wilder's preternatural sense of his own importance, his struggle with the premonition that he was destined for something eternal.  At 20, I'm sure that looked more like self-importance than importance - but almost a hundred years on (Our Town is enjoying its 75th anniversary this year), I think we have a different perspective on his self-image.

Photo: Roger Metcalfe

To be honest, however, many of these dramas (like much juvenilia) aren't particularly dramatic. Still, the Beasts' poetic playing style makes the most of them.  Only the Beasts could conjure, for instance, a raging ocean - with a mermaid breaking from its waves - in the confines of the BCA's Black Box. And there are many such transfixing moments here - Death overcoming Mozart; the tentacles of the Leviathan; the starry night that guided the flight into Egypt (at top); these images, rather than the texts of Wilder's immature skits, are what you remember from "Little Giants."

This production seemed to mark a surge of fresh acting blood into the Beasts - but generally, those with more experience in Woods' eccentric modes did best. The exception was Gabriel Graetz, whose fussy clowning was a standout (indeed, his improv with Beth Pearson may have been the best "playlet" of the evening). Meanwhile familiar Beasts Molly Kimmerling, Amy Meyer and William Schuller (as the mermaid, at right) brought their customary skill to bear on the material, and newcomers Tim Hoover, Cam Cronin and Amanda Goble all had their moments.  As usual, the remarkable costuming was by the gifted Cotton Talbot-Minkin; Jill Rogati provided the evocative puppet design.  I could not pretend that "Little Giants" is for everyone; but I have a hunch it will build the Beasts' audience by at least a few more increments.

The scoop on Our Town: yes, it is unforgettable, and yes, it will sell out completely

Therese Plaehn, David Cromer, and Derrick Trumbly in Our Town.  Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

This is just an early warning to fans of the Hub Review regarding the Huntington's re-mounting of David Cromer's celebrated version of Thornton Wilder's Our Town:

Yes, you do want to see it, and yes, it will sell out completely (even though the run has already been extended).  Indeed, since seating is fairly limited in the Roberts Studio Theatre, expect this to be the hottest ticket in town once the reviews drop.

As for my review - well, this one's tricky, as Cromer's production depends on a specific coup de théâtre in the haunting last act that pulls together (with heartbreaking force) a concept that until then slightly mystified at least a few folks in the audience.  I don't believe the impact of this coup completely depends on its surprise - I guessed at its essence, and it still floored me - but I think epiphanies usually work best when they're unexpected, don't you?

Either way, Cromer's gambit is unforgettable, and while it violates Wilder's stage directions, it's actually utterly in consonance with his themes. Indeed, I think it will be hard to imagine Our Town in future without this masterstroke; it will become a touchstone of the play's performance history.

All I'll say is that it reminds you that Wilder's deepest theme is something like "Life is not a rehearsal."  To be honest, perhaps not everyone in the (mostly local) cast was equally at ease with the production concept on opening night - but certainly local lights Nael Nacer, Marianna Bassham, Alex Pollock, and Paul Farwell excelled.

And it's worth noting that director Cromer, in one more meta-theatrical flourish, is himself in the cast, as the Stage Manager (a role the author himself sometimes played, as at left, in Wellesley in 1950) - but only through December 30.

The bottom line is simply that this Our Town is unforgettable.  Beyond that, mum's the word.