Michael Lepore, Micaela Diamond, Ruthie Ann Miles, Geena Quintos, and David Ryan Smith in The Seat of Our Pants. Photo: Joan Marcus

Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth has always been a flamboyantly weird piece of work: Yes, it won a Pulitzer Prize, but it’s also a shaggy dog of a family saga that sprawls across not just generations but the scope of human time, from the invention of the wheel on forward, ticking past disaster after disaster–from an ice age hitting a New Jersey suburb to an Atlantic City hurricane that’s also the biblical flood to a totalizing war that would have seemed grindingly familiar at the play’s 1942 premiere. Wilder takes the world-weary but somehow still paradoxically optimistic perspective that if humanity has survived being on the brink of extinction before, we’ll probably survive again. It’s a mashup of time, place, genre, and style, and counts a dinosaur, a woolly mammoth, most of the mammalian kingdom, and a beauty queen among its secondary characters. It complicates its own narrative and philosophical momentum on the regular with metatheatrical interventions and self-commentary, much of it through the mouthpiece of the family maid, adding a subtle class dynamic. What it’s not is warm, or even particularly human; its characters remain archetypal, and archly stylized, throughout, and its big narrative sweep has more to say about The Human Experience and The Nature of Theater than it does about actual people. 

In our own very dark timeline, The Skin of Our Teeth feels appropriate on grounds of mood—not to mention more than a little prescient on the subject of climate change–and it’s easy to see why pairing Wilder with playwright/musician Ethan Lipton to create The Seat of Our Pants seems like an inspired way to turn this unwieldy play into the musical that several musical-theater luminaries have tried and failed at before. Lipton’s musicals, full of rueful wit and often starring himself as a congenial Everyman, wrangle their way to a reluctant optimism about the best that humans are capable of–alongside a clear-eyed acknowledgment of how rarely we hit those heights. And even when the themes peer into some pretty scary abysses—the offshoring of the American economy; gentrification; the Singularity—Lipton’s songs are catchy and charming, full of the best kind of whimsy and just a little melancholy. (The comedy in his straight plays is a little blacker and bleaker, but still infused with warmth.) If Wilder’s weird is epic and broad, Lipton’s is more quirky and offbeat, but they both look at humanity’s foibles and failures with a generosity of spirit. 

The conceit of Skin/Seat that its central family, the Antrobuses, encapsulates all of human history at once: George Antrobus (Shuler Hensley) is an inventor, responsible for the alphabet, the lever, and the wheel–but also goes to the office every day in a suit and tie from his middle-class suburban home, sends a telegram when he’ll be delayed, and gives addresses on the radio. He and his wife, Maggie (Ruthie Ann Miles), have been married for 5,000 years, but remain at a comfortable middle age, though we do see their children, Henry (Damon Daunno) and Gladys (Amina Faye), age from schoolkids to early adulthood, with the rebellious Henry going off to war and Gladys bearing a child in wartime. The play’s three acts take place in different no-times-that-are-also-now: an ice age where food is scarce, mammoths are pets, and refugees travel south ahead of creeping icebergs; a seaside resort where Antrobus is elected head of the mammalian kingdom as a great flood is coming, and is tempted to leave his wife for a beauty queen (Micaela Diamond, who also plays the Antrobus maid, Sabina, in acts 1 and 3); and the end of a war where Mrs. Antrobus and Gladys have been hiding in a bunker beneath the ruins of the former home while the men went off to fight. 

Lipton’s songs in and of themselves are delightful, full of cleverness, cheer, and subtler emotional shadings that gesture toward the gaps in Wilder’s elliptical characters—especially Damon Daunno’s Henry, a prisoner to his own inchoate urges, and Miles’s Mrs. Antrobus, with a slight tinge of acid in her maternal devotion. Where George gets credit for most of the key inventions underpinning modern civilization, Maggie gets credit for…the apron. Lipton tries to nod to the gender politics in some of the songs but the “typical American family” of it all does lock Mrs. Antrobus into Mother and Domestic Goddess as her primary role.) But while the attitudes of the characters may be slightly updated, and there’s a quick invocation of invocation of “recession-pandemic-wildfire-oligarchy” to loosely position us in the now, but the “modern” age of the narrative still stops in 1942–while there is that allusion to pandemic etc, Kaye Voyce’s costumes, Sunny Min-Sook Hitt’s choreography, the vocabulary and tone of Lipton’s/Wilder’s dialogue, the technology, never get closer to our present than Wilder imagined them. “My hope is that if we can make this glorious structure habitable enough for us to live in today, then it can show us ourselves today,” says the Announcer/narrator (Andy Groteleuschen)–but it feels more like the songs substitute for a thoroughgoing renovation. It’s spruced up and better decorated, but the bones haven’t been touched .

The show’s metatheatrical digressions could also be used to continue this conversation, but the songs sit uneasily alongside the piece’s breaking of the fourth wall. Micaela Diamond gives a sharp performance as the reluctant over-the-whole-thing actress Miss Sommerset alongside her more stylized work as Sabina the maid and Lilly-Sabina the beauty queen (and her singing voice is as exquisite as ever). Still, layering songs onto the parts of the show that are supposed to be interrogating themselves creates a hall-of-mirrors effect that Lipton and director Leigh Silverman can’t quite work themselves out of. 

The physical production, too, doesn’t entirely serve. On a big, square stage with audience seating on two sides, Silverman and Hitt, as well as set designer Lee Jellinek, end up marooning clusters of actors or single random pieces of furniture. In a few big numbers (particularly the march of mammals in act 2, with a striking procession of animal-head masks), the breadth feels justified, but for anything smaller, the action gets lost. (It’s also odd that with virtually no set, the scene changes between acts–only one which of gets an actual intermission–feel so extended and clunky.) 

In each act, the Antrobuses pick themselves up after (or during) a disaster and start over–and that’s where The Seat of Our Pants leaves us: another exhortation to begin again. “We start anew–it’s what we do.” That very Liptonian sentiment is what draws Wilder and Lipton together–I just wish the conjunction were a little more fruitful.