"Ladies and gentlemen, I m not going to play this particular scene tonight." - Sabina

Thornton Wilder s The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) telescopes an audacious stretch of western history and mythology into a family drama, showing how the course of human events operates like theatre itself: constantly mutable, vanishing and beginning again.

Kyle Gillette explores Wilder s extraordinary play in three parts. Part I unpacks the play s singular yet deeply interconnected place in theatre history, comparing its metatheatrics to those of...