The posting of this video stands as a shining example of how awesome the existence of RU-vid is. Thanks for a wonderful post. Brilliant performance of a Masterpiece in playwrighting. Don't miss it if you havent seen it. I'm just blown away
So impressed was I by this play, and having no other way to see it again after its original run on PBS in 1983, that I journeyed to the William Paley Museum of Television and Radio in New York City to make a request for it to see it again about 15 years later. I’m so pleased that someone was able and willing to post it. It is an amazing play and a brilliant production with a star cast.
I have enjoyed this play, for me listening to the words is like listening to music. I played Sabina in my university's production. But I played her nothing like this actress. Nor did the rest of the cast. The beautiful words and thoughts get lost in silliness. I played Sabina as if she knew exactly what the playwright what the playwright was saying. In this rushed scattered performance, this clueless performance, there is no coherence between actor and script. This is too much. If I want to hear Thorton Wilder, I will read him.
@@dianablue565then you didn’t understand her character at all. She was supposed to be the audience. She wasn’t supposed to understand the play so she could reel the audience in just in case they were lost. That’s the point of the wall break. That’s the point of it being a satire.
We all grew up with Our Town. I read this when I was a teenager - it was so strange and goofy and ambitious. I didn't know that last word then. I recommend the RU-vid posted excerpts of VIVIAN LEIGH as Sabrina. Absolutely brilliant - as is the cast and production.
I pitched the idea of a play without a fourth wall, where the director and crew were characters, and some of the "crowd" were placed cast members,, and the director would get mad when actors missed cues or lines. He responed by telling me he'd send me a play. This was that play.
A glorious production of a wonderful and highly entertaining play! I first saw The Skin while my future wife was attending the University of Minnesota in the summer of 1980. Forty years later (and during the pandemic) I am so enjoying this production!
The Skin of Our Teeth toured Australia after WW2 in a production by the Old Vic Theatre starring Vivian Leigh and Laurence Olivier. It was partly a PR venture by Britain to defect a move to American influence on Australia after the war (oddly,The Vic chose an American play) and played to sell out seasons in all the mainland capitals and New Zealand
Thank you for posting this. I watched it as a child on PBS. It nurtured my love of theater. I was transfixed. Even then I knew on some deep, basic, primitive and indescribable level that I was in the presence of genius. Using words I now only have as an adult I can now say that by the end of the play I was in a “holy place,” transported to another level. I had a genuinely visceral experience of theatrical catharsis, an emotional experience I had no word for until I learned the word for it in college. Thornton Wilder’s play is an incredible feat thrown at the audience at almost breakneck speed with eternal truths leavened with brilliant humor. It posseses amazing insight into humans and our human nature - or narures - our history and culture, gender roles and archetypes, our duality of nobility and goodness versus our inextricablly interwoven innate savagery and cruelty, all simultaneously mixed with a commentary on American middle class culture and values. Our essential animal need to survive and procreate alongside our mind's need to discover, invent, experiment, create and to seek meaning and the transcendent - our essential animal identity joined at the hip with our need to eat, drink, mate and predominate.
I have a theatre company. The company I use for ticket sales offers pre made logos for different shows. By The Skin of Our Teeth was one of those with a dinosaur on it. I had to look it up… and I’m glad I did.
And having just come off the run as the materfamilias Katherine Lawrence on the ABC Television drama _Family_ which left the air just three years before, she was perfect for the role of the Eternal Mother.
You read that somewhere or noticed it yourself? I read on Wikipedia that Joseph Campbell accused him of taking elements of Finnegan's Wake. This play, reading this play (I've never seen it performed 'til this video), was a huge influence on me. So naturally I was bummed to learn he may have cribbed parts of it. So I read a synopsis of Finnegan's Wake. I can't make heads or tails of the synopsis even, and the actual book is supposedly written in an intentionally dense style where he mixes English and Gaelic words and makes up words, etc. I couldn't determine from the synopsis what it has to do with THIS. Except that they both hint at bigger subjects, statements on the nature of man and society- though Joyce apparently goes out of his way to obscure those themes under impossible prose. Have you read it? I've never met anyone who has. I know a couple people who claim to love Joyce, go to Bloom's Day every year, etc. They haven't even read it. If you have, HOW is it similar? What I'm guessing is Wilder may have been influenced by some of Joyce's ideas. Same as Hesse was with Nietzsche and Jung. There would be no Demian, or it would have been a very different book, had he never read Nietzsche or Jung. But he created from those ideas something different and more palatable, and he credited them! This probably could've all been solved if Wilder simply had Sabina make a couple asides, "This is getting a litte too James Joyce for my money" or something like that. "Hmm, SOME-body really read their James Joyce, huh, folks?" Something like that. 'Cause plot-wise, structure-wise, I don't see how they have anything in common. I'm sorry, but Finnegan's Wake sounds completely obnoxious. Intentionally hard to penetrate prose? Eff you, buddy. Haha. We've got stuff to do. You got something to tell us, friggin tell us!
