Sarah on theater

It’s tricky to write about this because I haven’t seen The Skin of Our Teeth, and I don’t know how much of a departure this is from that, so the specific success or failure of The Seat of Our Pants as a musical adaptation pretty well eludes me. My hunch is that it’s successful at that particular deed—the songs seemed well-integrated and thematically on-point to me, a couple of groaner lyrics aside. The way the book is written allows for a few of those.

To that point, if you don’t know, The Skin of Our Teeth is a Pulitzer-winning comedy-drama from 1942 by esteemed arch-playwright Thornton Wilder, and it has a reputation for being somewhat difficult to stage for its off-the-wall surrealism and tone. It’s a thoroughly metatheatrical and heavily allegorical work about a family over the course of about 5,000 years. The father and the mother, Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus, represent something like the human tendency to disorder and order, respectively. He builds things—the wheel, the ark, progress—to bend the natural order to his will. She’s preoccupied with matters of decorum, circling the wagons, and caring for their kids, Henry, the avatar of violence, & Gladys, the giver of life. The common man is represented by the housekeeper, Sabina, who is subject to a soup of wills & whims of human nature, and we follow the five of them across a geological timespan as they experience a cycle of crises natural, manmade, and divine. The human condition is to weather the storm and rebuild in the aftermath, so treasure the good times when you’ve got them. (Lick the ice cream before it falls off the cone.) Also, the character list includes “Dinosaur” and “Woolly Mammoth.” There’s a lot going on.

The Seat of Our Pants, adapted by Obie-winning librettist Ethan Lipton, aims to modernize that text and accessibilize it by sprinkling some songs on top & casting a rogue’s gallery of Tony winners and nominees. I think what Lipton’s done here is really successful in the sense that it feels like a cohesive piece—the songs don’t feel particularly shoehorned in, they’re hum-worthy on their own merits, and it feels like the strengths and weaknesses of Wilder’s original work are being tidily passed through. A veteran theatergoer in the audience told me that she had seen about five productions of the original and this was the most resonant for her. Me, I left the show in good spirits, took my train home a stop too far, had nice pizza and then a happy scoop of Van Leeuwen out in the cold weather.

If I have a meaningful criticism, it’s that Wilder’s original work is pretty batty, but it feels a bit disingenuous to unload on it here—like that belongs in a different review. To give you the short version, I just think that the hard thing about doing a great big allegory like this is that it’s too easy to get mired in it, servicing your metaphors even at the expense of satisfying plot and characterization. (To give you a recent comparable, I felt similarly about Weather Girl at St. Ann’s Warehouse.) We’re never really meant to be engrossed here—the Brechtian thing is hammered home with a whole bunch of meta “we’re in a play!” lines and a traverse-staged opposing audience—so I wasn’t engrossed. I spent a good amount of time politely admiring the cleverness of the writers and the adeptness of the performers, particularly Micaela Diamond as Sabina, and a good amount of time trying to resist letting my mind wander, especially in the first act. Things are just happening and not to anyone in particular.

“Ah,” you chide, “you’ve missed the point.” Okay. Maybe I have, a little bit. The human condition is cyclical and full of random crises. We are all all of the characters. The structure of the play reflects that, so the wonkiness is justified. But it’s still wonky! Even the most meticulous intellectual construction masquerading as a play has to contend with the limits of patience and attention imposed by its audience’s very human bodies. Don’t get me wrong, I left with a good impression; I just think there’s a ceiling on this kind of thing for me.