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Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer winner is first play by contemporary writer at the California Shakespeare Festival 

California Shakespeare Festival shifted into a new gear Saturday night, for the first time in the company’s 28-year history opening a play by a modern writer. The show at hand is a rich and bizarre production of Thornton Wilder’s difficult 1942 Pulitzer winner “The Skin of Our Teeth.” 

Wilder is a fitting choice for the company’s first venture into modern drama, I suppose, since the playwright lived in Berkeley as a youth and attended Emerson School before graduating from Berkeley High in 1915. 

And Cal Shakes itself began life in 1974 as the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival, performing its outdoor summer shows at John Hinkel Park before moving to the larger Bruns Amphitheater in Orinda ten years ago. 

“Skin of Our Teeth” won Wilder a third Pulitzer after opening at the Plymouth Theater in New York in November of 1942, directed by Broadway legend Elia Kazan and starring Fredric March, Montgomery Clift and Tallulah Bankhead. 

The show ran 355 performances. A London production directed by Lawrence Olivier opened in May of 1945. 

Despite this strong pedigree, “Skin of Our Teeth” is an infrequently performed play. A mix of solemn, absurdist allegorical comedy, didactic speechifying, and cartoony family melodrama, the script makes it hard to find a workable mix of humor and drama in its staging. 

Further, the characters themselves are two-dimensional, so it’s really up to the actors to flesh them out credibly as real human beings in performance. 

The good news is that director Richard Hamburger and the Cal Shakes performers have pulled it off. They have put together an intriguing evening, and as rich and interesting a production of this play as you are likely to see. 

“The Skin of Our Teeth” presents a cartoony version of human anthropological and religious history as told through a quirky, “Father Knows Best” type of domestic melodrama. 

The Cal Shakes production opens on scenic designer Narelle Sissons’ striking yellow, green and red living room set where George Antrobus (Paul Vincent O’Connor) comes home to his suburban middle class New Jersey dwelling after a long day at the office inventing the alphabet and the wheel. 

His wife Mrs. Antrobus (Berkeley’s Lorri Holt) has been bickering in the living room with the maid Sabina (Kathleen McNenny), who also serves as George’s mistress since he captured her in battle. The family has a pet dinosaur–and a hairy mammoth that they keep for milk. (Hilarious performances by Michael Chmiel (sic) and Michael Brusasco.) 

Soon an iceberg moving south brings refugees into the living room – including Homer, Moses and three muses. 

In the second act, George is elected president of the mammals at an Atlantic City convention. After 5,000 years of marriage, he abandons his wife for a beauty queen. A sudden flood puts selected species on an ark. 

In the final act, back in New Jersey, the family tries to put its life together in a bombed out living room, in the aftermath of a terrible war. 

Oh, yes. The whole story is structured as a play within a television show – with a director, stagehands and techs floating around the edges of the production. Occasionally, actors break the fourth wall in frustration and complain about the play to the audience. 

This was avant-garde theater in 1942, when “Skin” was produced in the middle of World War II. Cubist painting influenced Wilder. His magpie-like collection of social debate fragments from the 1940s can be seen as a cubist attempt to tell multiple facets of a story simultaneously. 

Despite the two-dimensional characters, the didactic speechifying, and the childish—almost infantile—level of discussion among Antrobus family members, Cal Shakes and director Hamburger have staged the play thoughtfully. They have added density to the story by creating a lot of subtext, humor and backstory that bring the two-dimensional tale to life. 

The acting is terrific across the board. O’Connor is a quintessential American father – self-absorbed, gruff, violent, paternalistic, narcissistic. He discovers some of his limitations by the end of the evening. 

McNenny vamps in the sexy and histrionic role of maid/mistress Sabina, played on Broadway by Tallulah Bankhead. She gives the stock character an interesting range, chafing at the edges of her sexual identity. 

Lorri Holt is great as the put-upon 1940s suburban housewife Mrs. Antrobus. Angry, patient, funny, resigned, philosophical, driven, aware, she gives the character a wide range of depth, intelligence and humor. 

Charles Dean has some funny moments as the quirky, pressured television show director, suffering in the third act at having to rehearse amateurs when seven actors come down with food poisoning. 

Luis Oropeza has some nice comic relief moments in smaller roles, as a telegram delivery boy with a poor memory, and later as a substitute actor who rises powerfully to his mission. 

In “Skin of Our Teeth,” Wilder is saying that we have met the enemy – and he is us. The Cal Shakes staging is a superb opportunity to catch a thoughtful, elaborate and intriguing production of a rarely performed work by Berkeley’s most famous playwright. 

“The Skin of Our Teeth,” by Thornton Wilder, presented by Cal Shakes at Bruns Amphitheater, Shakespeare Festival Way off Highway 24, Orinda, Wednesday through Sunday through July 29. Call (510) 548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org. 

Planet theater reviewer John Angell Grant has written for American Theater, Back Stage West, Callboard and many other publications. E-mail him at jagplays@yahoo.com.