Railway travel has definitely influenced modern theatre's sense of space and time. Early in the 20th century, breakthroughs--ranging from F.T. Marinetti's futurist manifestos to epic theatre's first use of the treadmill--explored the mechanical rhythms and perceptual effects of railway travel to investigate history, technology, and motion. After World War II, some playwrights and auteur directors, from Armand Gatti to Robert Wilson to Amiri Baraka, looked to locomotion not as a radically new space and time but as a reminder of obsolescence, complicity in the Holocaust, and its role in...

"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...