The Seat of Our Pants

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Thornton Wilder’s 1942 Pulitzer Prize-winning allegorical meta-theatrical comedy The Skin of Our Teeth about the 5,000 years of human endeavor has defied musicalization until now. The Public Theater is presenting the pleasant if underwhelming adaptation retitled The Seat of Our Pants with book, music and lyrics by Ethan Lipton, known for his musicals No Place to Go and We Are Your Robots. The stellar cast includes Tony Award winners Shuler Hensley and Ruthie Ann Miles, and Tony nominees Micaela Diamond and Damon Daunno, as well as Amina Faye who has appeared in New York in the Tony Awards musicals Suffs and Six. Director Leigh Silverman has previously worked with Lipton on his Tumacho and We Are Your Robots.

The new musical has some clever updating, references to Come From Away, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Sunday in the Park with George and The Seussical, as well as a revisal of Wilder’s statement “Don’t forget that a few years ago we came through the depression by the skin of our teeth. One more tight squeeze like that and where will we be?” had been changed to “we made it through the recession-pandemic-wildfire-oligarchy by the seat of our pants.” However, it is far too respectful of the original, (even keeping the three acts structure but now with only one intermission,) with all the best lines coming directly from Wilder’s 1942 text.

The devise of breaking the fourth wall is still necessarily in place with Sabina, the maid, continually talking directly to the audience as well as moments when the actors drop their characters and supposedly talk as themselves. Lipton has made good use of this with some tongue in cheek asides in the new version: “And now some other guy’s added songs. Songs! Because that’s what it was missing.” Lipton has also added an announcer played by Andy Grotelueschen who opens each act with an update setting the scene, shades of the Stage Manager in Wilder’s earlier Our Town.

In order to add songs, Lipton has shortened and simplified Wilder’s original play. The final sequence which originally presented a pageant of quotes from the great philosophers of the past including Plato, Aristotle and Spinoza in the form of the hours has been cut and replaced with a final song “We’re a Disaster (just waiting to happen)” which does just as well for modern audiences. In fact, Lipton’s version may be watered down Wilder but it will be much more accessible to audiences who had trouble understanding the 2022 staging of the original at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater. Ironically, many of its most experimental techniques go back to Pirandello, Joyce and Bertolt Brecht so they are not new.

Written at the height of World War II, the play attempts to demonstrate the resilience of the human race beginning with the Ice Age in Act I, reaching Noah and the Flood in Act II, and ending with the peace after a world war. Historically speaking, The Skin of Our Teeth was one the most popular plays in Germany after W.W. II with 500 productions by 1949 as its hopefulness spoke to many people. In Act I we are introduced to the Antrobus family of Excelsior, New Jersey: Maggie Antrobus, inventor of the apron and mother to Henry, formerly Cain, and Gladys, and husband George who invents the alphabet, numerical table and the brewing of beer. Their maid Sabina who would like to be a femme fatale lets the audience know she doesn’t understand a word of the play and only took the job because she had been out of work so long.

Due to the cold, their pet Mammoth and Dinosaur keep trying to get into the house but Sabina has let the fire go out. When Mr. Antrobus comes home from work, he brings with him refugees escaping from the approaching wall of ice who include Homer, Judge Moses and Miss M. Muse and Miss T Muse. Henry has hit a boy at school when angered by being called by his old name and Gladys has recited a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the assembly. At the end of the act Sabina calls for the audience to “pass up the chairs, everybody. Save the human race.”

Sometime later after the end of the Ice Age Act II takes place in Atlantic City at the Convention of the Ancient and Honorable Order of Mammals, Division Humans, with delegations from “rival orders including … the Wings, the Fins, the Shells and so on.” George Antrobus has been elected president for the ensuing term. He is accompanied by his wife Maggie (with whom he is about to celebrate their 5,000^th wedding anniversary) and their two children Henry and Gladys.

Although they do not seem to recognize her, their former maid Sabina now using her full name of Lily-Sabina Fairweather has been elected winner of the Atlantic City beauty contest. In cahoots with the Fortune Teller who has a stall on the Boardwalk, Sabina wants to seduce Antrobus into divorcing his wife and marrying her. However, Henry hits someone and Mrs. Antrobus finds Gladys wearing red stockings like Sabina’s. Just as President Antrobus is asked to make an announcement due to the change in the weather, the signals go from Hurricane to the end of the world and he hurries his family on board the boat at the end of the pier along with two of each species. The Fortune Teller has the last word: “Time is running out. Go. Go, animals. Start a new world. Begin again.”

Act III begins with announcement that “The war is over. For now.” Sabina dressed as a Napoleonic camp follower calls for Mrs. Antrobus and Gladys who have been living underground below a trap door, while their house in Excelsior is in ruins. Gladys has had a baby she has named Pearl and Mr. Antrobus and Henry have not been home for seven years but Sabina has seen both of them in town. Mr. Antrobus sends word that they are not to let Henry in if he appears as he is the enemy, and if his books have not been saved he doesn’t want to begin again. When father and son meet, Henry tries to kill Mr. Antrobus in order to finally feel free, but his father disarms him. After Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus are reunited, she tells him that he simply has to go on, that he has no choice. Sabina informs us that the ending goes on for another two hours and that the play begins again, but the audience can go home.

The score has a folk feel to it and is often accompanied by Allison Ann Kelly on guitar or banjo. The American sounding music occasionally sounds like that of composer Aaron Copland. While the show has no showstoppers, several of the songs are standouts: Mrs. Antrobus and Sabina’s song about dealing with fears, “Stuff it Down Inside,” and Mr. Antrobus’ song about sharing life with “Good People” in the first act, and Mrs. Antrobus and Sabina’s hopeful “We Didn’t Ruin Everything” and Sabina’s witty “The Wonderful Thing About Ice Cream,” a paean to the mundane things in life, both in Act III.

Silverman has directed her cast to be very low key. As Sabina, Diamond does not dominate the play as in other revivals of the original Wilder script, but she comes into her own in Act II as the ambitious beauty queen who wants to stay out of the kitchen. Rather than bigger than life as Mr. Antrobus is usually played, Hensley is rather innocuous, seemingly afraid of his wife. While Miles never loses her temper as Mrs. Antrobus, she is totally convincing as a mother who would do anything to protect her children.

Daunno as the pugnacious Henry has a great deal more virility and drive than the others. As his sister Gladys, Faye isn’t given much to do but makes the part her own, nevertheless. If memory serves, the role of the Fortune Teller has been cut down but Ally Bonino makes a meal of her sequence of songs beginning with “I Can See the Future On Your Faces.” In the smaller roles, Grotelueschen is amusing as the avuncular Announcer who also is the author’s stand-in during a particularly fraught moment.

The orchestra directed by Nathan Koci, also on keyboard, has been fetchingly dressed by Kay Voyce in Act I to resemble the wallpaper in the Antrobus home while in Act II they are dressed in red vests like the delegates to the convention. Voyce’s animal costumes are best for the full baby Mammoth and Dinosaur outfits in Act I, while the animals at the convention are represented by headdresses over red vests and red pants, with gold sashes around their waists. Lee Jellinek’s set is diminished by the fact that the audience sits on two sides of the stage facing each other. His Antrobus house in Act I and his Atlantic City set for Act II has to be one that the audience can see right through so that they are rather sketchy. Drew Levy’s sound design is particularly effective for the coming storm in Act II.

The Seat of Our Pants, Ethan Lipton’s musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, is both pleasant and entertaining. By cutting out almost all of the original play’s philosophy, it diminishes Wilder’s original intention but may be all contemporary audiences want today. While Ethan Lipton’s new musical may have further to go, it is an accomplished piece of theater whose source material has defeated other composers and lyricists.

The Seat of Our Pants (extended through December 7, 2025)

The Public Theater

Newman Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, call 212-539-8500 or visit http://www.publictheater.org

Running time two hours and 45 minutes including one intermission