It was the opening night of the first play that PlayMakers Repertory Company (PRC) had done before an audience in twenty months; Julius Caesar was canceled after five performances on 11 March 2020. Onstage were two veteran PRC actors, Ray Dooley and Kathryn Hunter Williams. The characters they were playing, George and Maggie Antrobus, represent all humanity, and they have just reunited after a war. They clutched hands, their eyes glistening with tears, and Dooley spoke, as George’s shaken resolve begins to return: “And the thought of you and the children and this house” (282). He looked out at the Paul Green Theatre—filled this November night with friends, family, University colleagues, longtime PRC subscribers, and UNC drama majors. The audience were all masked, but many an eye out here could be seen glistening with tears too.The real and fictional worlds mingled, and as the final, philosophical statements of Thornton Wilder’s play washed over us, all kinds of emotions fired—from joy to grief, dread to relief. This play resonated on levels universal and perennial, local and personal. We, too, had “come a long ways,” and we had “learned,” and yet so much work lay before us. This resonance was partly that we had a kindled hope that the pandemic might just be letting up, partly that we were just so hungry for the theater’s peculiar form of sustenance. The resonance must be ascribed to the power of this eighty-year-old play.Paul Green Theatre buzzed with anticipation for that thing we had missed for so long, that regular dose of PlayMakers’ playmaking—well-produced, probing and entertaining, frequently poignant and funny by turn, and often challenging, edifying, and life-affirming. Sometimes the roof opens up, and the maenads above pour down the wine of enthousiasmos upon the occupants of this house. Would this be one of those nights? PlayMakers is a deep-rooted institution at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. Housed and inextricably linked with the Department of Dramatic Art, it began over a hundred years ago with the Carolina Playmakers and Fred “Prof” Koch’s vision of American folk drama. In 1976, PlayMakers Repertory Company was founded as a LORT regional theater, albeit one under the auspices of the University and with a resident company comprised of faculty and graduate students. Now after nearly two years of scrapped plans, false starts, Zoom productions, and streaming videos, PRC was finally ready to return to full form. The play they chose to quench our burning thirst was the second best-known play by Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth. It is a big show, an ambitious one to return with, and it seems most everyone in the Joan H. Gillings Center for Dramatic Art was involved in some way in this endeavor. When director Vivienne Benesch stepped up onto the deep-thrust stage to welcome the audience, they responded with eager anticipation for the coming production.One of the first things one notices when reading The Skin of Our Teeth is its presentational style, beginning as it does with slide projections and an announcer describing—in 1940s newsreel fashion—the Antrobus family from Excelsior, New Jersey. This PlayMakers production amplified the element of irony with its playful use of a period-style newsreel featuring, among others, longtime Department of Dramatic Art secretary (aka Student Services Specialist) Ms. Betty Futrell. This inclusion was very much in keeping with Wilder’s vision, as he places blanks in certain places in the script for the producing company to add their local details. This irony and playfulness, however, soon bumps against the grave central theme raised by the play: the end of the world.Wilder presents the Antrobus family as exemplars of pre-World War II modernist American culture, yet we soon learn they are also the family of Adam and Eve (plus Cain, but without Abel). They are also somehow cavepeople encountering the Ice Age who display the progressive fervor and ingenuity of early civilization. Audience members unfamiliar with the play will find themselves on their back foot as they try to harmonize these overlapping personae. In the PRC production, we first saw the Antrobuses in the projected newsreel, and here was a further element to be harmonized: the racial makeup of the family. The father, George, was white, while the mother, Maggie, and the two children, Henry and Gladys, were Black. Cross-racial casting is not unique to PlayMakers, but this choice would prove significant and resonant throughout the play, even harrowing in the third act.The play proper began with the family’s maid, Sabina, looking out the window and narrating the crisis of the day: “Oh, oh, oh! Six o’clock and the master not home yet. Pray God nothing serious has happened to him crossing the Hudson River” (215). We noted the allusion to another patriarch named George and the use of direct address, a traditional breaking of the fourth wall. Wilder would soon use Sabina, however, to break the fourth wall in his signature way—that is, having the actor “break character” and speak to the audience as herself, in this case frustrated and wary of a faltering production. Some students in the audience later commented that they believed—at least for a while—that it was the actor breaking character, until they sensed a certain scripted method to the language. When asked why the playwright might choose to interrupt his own story, their answers differed, but most agreed that Wilder seems intent on keeping us off-balance.The Antrobus family is continually facing extinction. In Act 1, it is a great wall of ice approaching their Excelsior home. In Act 2, there is a deluge coming to crash their Atlantic City vacation. In Act 3, a great war has just ended but not the war within the family. In a way, The Skin of Our Teeth is like three related one-act plays, where characters and themes are aligned but each act has a doomsday scenario which the characters face. Over the course of the play, we start to see these crises as external, whereas the deeper danger is the cracks and fissures in their family unit. We start to understand the question “Will they survive this?” to be equivalent to “Will they pull together?” As they are representatives of all humanity, we are rooting for them.The PlayMakers production reinforced this as a unified story, the story of all humanity. One indication is the scene design of resident designer and UNC professor, Jan Chambers. Whereas the play would seem to call for two distinct sets—Act 3 being just their bombed-out Excelsior home—Chambers used a single malleable set able to suggest both place and placelessness with its partial architecture. With the choreographed use of a turntable and moving gables, the audience was delighted by moments of transformation, where the set pieces were twisted and contorted into new, but recognizable, versions of themselves—thus reinforcing a key theme of the play. The other half of PRC’s resident designer duo is McKay Coble, and both she and Chambers are equally virtuosic with costume and set design. As a designer, Coble combines both grand vision and attention to detail. With this production, the first costume everyone marveled at was the Woolly Mammoth in Act 1—a remarkable shaggy construction (Fig. 1). Meeting the diverse and myriad costume requirements of this production was a great feat.The production also featured visiting designers, with lighting by Reza Behjat, who used a strong presentational flavor which effectively supported the storytelling. Mark Valenzuela’s sound design was charming, with two acts underscored by nostalgia of different eras, while composer Fabian Obispo’s spare, atavistic song in the refugee section of Act 1 was hauntingly evocative as sung by Sanjana Taskar. The projection and video team of Shawn Duan and Maxwell Bowman were quite impressive both with video, such as the tongue-in-cheek 1940s feel of the opening “News Events of the World,” and with projection, as is seen in the flashy excess of Atlantic City in Act 2, taking place in 1984 in this production.As much as design can aid in building a unified, yet varied world, most of that work falls inevitably to the people of that world. Here, PlayMakers benefits from a rare phenomenon in today’s theater world—a resident acting company. Like many plays of the early twentieth century, The Skin of Our Teeth has a swollen cast with 37 roles designated by the playwright. With some double- and triple-casting, director Vivienne Benesch did the job with eighteen actors, all in-house—four from the faculty, all twelve graduate actors, and two senior undergraduate students. PlayMakers was looking for a large play, not just for its audience but for its graduate students, who had—with the rest of the academic world—been short-changed by the pandemic.This production was also unified by the rock-solid onstage relationship of Williams and Dooley, even as the world of the play is grounded in the strength of the promise between Maggie and George. These characters are archetypes which gain some specificity as Wilder situates them in the particular place and time of each respective act. George—our Everyman—has a shade of caveman in Act 1 and a dash of debonair politician in Act 2. In Act 3, he is the hardened man of war. He is said to be ingenious and industrious, and Wilder relies on our quick projections of the classic protagonist role on him for many such qualities, except for one which is actively centered—his fragile and faltering hope. George has some Willy Loman in him. As played by Dooley, George was by turns vigorous and limp, coarse and stately, unsteady and assured. He was in top form and full control in this, his last performance with PRC; he was retiring after over thirty years at UNC and 105 productions at PlayMakers.Holding up the other half of this home is Maggie—the most stable of the Antrobus lot. If George longs to discover, push forward, and break out of restraints, Maggie cleaves to tradition and to the hard-won victories of the past. Half her time is spent keeping her children on course, and the other half is propping up her husband’s flagging spirits. As such, she can be purblind, especially regarding the needs of those outside her nuclear family, and she does not have time for excess or shenanigans or wavering from the straight and narrow. UNC faculty member Kathryn Hunter Williams brought her charm and capacity with playing style to Maggie. As Acts 1 and 2 both begin with a broader presentational style then gradually dial in to the urgent and real, Williams blended the two together seamlessly. She brought the timing and flair she has exercised in the comedies of Shakespeare and Moliere, but then she sank into such an emotional gear when she cried out the names of her sons—each lost in his own way—that she just might raise the dead.Other standout performances included Tori Jewell as the mercurial Sabina, Anthony August as a tempestuous Henry, Omolade Wey as an animated Gladys, and Sergio Mauritz-Eng as an entrancing Fortune Teller. As the Antrobus children, August brought intensity and a resonating grievance to the violent, despairing Henry, while Wey’s bounding, gangly Gladys acquired by the end of the play the radiant aura of motherhood. Tori Jewell’s Sabina was robust and whingy, charismatic and scrappy, initially bright-eyed and then tethered to despair. Jewell used her vocal strength to fill this large space when so many of the play’s lines were her own, and for this, some credit must go to vocal coach Gwendolyn Schwinke, who also performed as a member of the ensemble in the production.If the big three components of a play are plot, character, and theme, The Skin of Our Teeth leans most heavily on the pillar of theme. Characters never veer far from their types, and the plot switches its given circumstances in each act. The play, however, gains much of its strength by its cerebral assault of layered literary allusions, and it packs an emotional punch at the end of each act because of how its embodiment of myth and archetype resonates in the mind and heart of the viewer. Extinction events—an Ice Age, a great flood, an apocalyptic war; Wilder always grapples with the biggest issue in sight. He employs the metatheatricality broached by the Modernism of the early 1900s, popularized by plays such as Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and Wilder’s own Our Town. The breaking of stage convention and the fourth wall is a wink at the artificiality of drama, and, if handled wisely, may call up a sense of authorial control, while wearing down the imagined barrier between audience and character. Anachronism is another device Wilder uses lavishly, as he ascribes multiple past times and epochs to the Antrobuses’ present moment, thus revealing essential patterns through juxtaposition. The Antrobuses are our “Every-Family,” and the patterns humanity passes through are perennial.While the metatheatrical aspects do cause some narrative disruption, by far the greatest contributor to our cognitive dissonance is the anachronism with the play’s timeline and the impossible lifespans of the Antrobus family. It is not that Wilder does not make a choice for his characters; it is that he makes several choices and continues to affirm them like a juggler simultaneously keeping four balls in the air. George is said to be fifty-five years old, but then he is also 6000 years old and he and Maggie have been married 5000 years. Then again, he is even older, when he battles the coming of an Ice Age—the last of which retreated about 12,000 years ago. As for place, New Jersey merges with the Levant, and there is the Garden of Eden, or are they in the Land of Nod? Add to that references to the Chapel Hill campus inserted in this production, and one can see how an audience might begin to suffer from narrative vertigo.The play does not appeal to everyone, and audiences which expect verisimilitude are going to be frustrated. Indeed, there were some PlayMakers audience members who left at the act break, announcing aloud their bewilderment—as audiences at the first production of the play did in 1942. The ideal spectator for this play is not some uber-academic who gets all the references and makes all the connections on a first viewing. Rather, it is one who climbs on board this departing vessel, willing figuratively to lend a hand and make some of the metaphorical connections themselves and not jump ship with the toss and turn of the cognitive waves. In other words, the ideal audience member is the one open-minded enough, or perhaps open-hearted enough, to project themselves onto the characters, whom Wilder has constantly vacillating between jumping ship and lending a hand.Tempo and tone are important in a play with such ambitious departures from traditional genre distinctions. This is an area where directors might well falter, but Vivienne Benesch, along with associate director Aubrey Snowden, showed consummate control. Appropriate time and attention was given to the micro- and macro-levels of story in a script that can get unwieldy. The first two acts started out with a kind of detached, comic narration that provided a Brechtian alienation as we grappled with the timelines. The Announcer, played by Jeff Cornell, gave us a fittingly brisk “news from the front” delivery in the opening narration in Act 1. He slowed it down and sleazed it up for Act 2, when he became a seedy Atlantic City impresario, personifying some of the excess and decadence Vivienne Benesch wished to emphasize from the 1980s.If Acts 1 and 2 begin in a broad, ironic vein then increase in realistic urgency, Act 3 is different. Thematically, the extinction event now is humanmade. War has left a civilization tottering, but the family has survived (Fig. 2). Here—other than the early interruption of the Stage Manager to rehearse the closing “Hours” segment—the play adheres closely to the sort of realism one might find in a family drama. In this act, the cross-racial casting of the PRC production had its most profound impact; the confrontation scene between George and Henry was no longer simply about a father-son rivalry. Yes, we knew that these two were father and son, but what we saw was an older, uniformed white man about to draw his gun on a younger Black man. Anthony August, playing Henry, raised his hands and turned his back. And all of the images that have animated the Black Lives Matter movement came to mind. And just as Wilder wrote a breakdown for the actor playing Henry in this scene, August found the climactic confrontation with George took a mental toll on him personally. In an interview with this reviewer, he observed, “At the end of the day, when I walk out of this building, I’m still a Black man in America.” The question arose of whether he felt supported by PRC and its protocols in this experience, especially considering the growing awareness of how racial trauma has been exploited on the American stage for centuries. His answer was an emphatic “yes,” and he mentioned how cast members and stage management, in particular, stepped up in support.It was in this same scene where a directorial choice departed from Wilder’s intended morality tale—and for good reason. Wilder comments in his stage directions that Henry should not be played as misunderstood or misguided, but as representing “strong unreconciled evil” (Collected Plays 276). Given the racial dynamic, that moment could not have been played responsibly as such. As it was played, we started to understand Henry’s evil as an outgrowth of a deep systemic breakdown.Other areas where the production made adjustments—adjustments agreed to by the Wilder Estate—included some minor updates to the language. The word “savage” was changed to “caveman.” More importantly, there were changes to the “Hours” scene, when Wilder lifts up before us the words of the great philosophers—upon which the bedrock of a civilization might be built. Still in place were the words from Descartes, Plato, Spinoza, and the Book of Genesis, but now included were the words of other philosophies and religions of the world. These were contributed by cast members who represent among themselves a diversity of beliefs and backgrounds. Vivienne Benesch and PRC were again taking steps toward the goal of diversity and inclusion.Any production of The Skin of Our Teeth will resonate if it makes the eternal, perennial struggles of the Antrobus family feel connected to our present-day struggles. As PRC’s senior resident dramaturg Adam Versenyi told the cast, this play is most often produced in times of societal crisis; this PlayMakers production succeeded in part because of timing. We are in the midst of multiple plagues: COVID, race and class divisions, plus the one felt most acutely on a college campus, the mental health challenges of the young. Hope is an unstable commodity these days, and this is something we share with the Antrobus family. Fall 2021 was a semester like no other at UNC; there were multiple suicides on campus, as well as floods of depression and anxiety afflicting half or more of the student body. As a consequence, sitting in the audience of this production, watching the ensemble of mostly young people dance to Prince’s 1984 hit “Let’s Go Crazy” like it was some defiant, last-ditch swipe at immortality, it was easy to make connections to the TikTok generation who feel they too are facing the end of the world. This musical dance number, choreographed by Tracy Bersley, made for an ecstatic end to the second act with the full ensemble in Dionysiac swing with raincoats and twirling umbrellas.The natural disasters of the play can be readily connected to our climate crisis and pandemic. We also see some reflection of the current civil discord in the United States in the undercurrent of tension between George and Henry, which eventually engulfs all in a devastating civil war. The refugee scene in Act 1 is profoundly affecting. Vivienne Benesch used the depths of the Paul Green playing space to have numerous bodies surround the Antrobus home. Initially these figures moved in the shadows, so there was a momentary sense of a zombie apocalypse, but then the figures began to cry out, “Mr. Antrobus,” and the pathos of their cries solidified their status not as threats but as victims. Kathryn Hunter Williams performed in this scene and, in an interview with this reviewer, she shared how her mind flashed to our southern border and then again to the periphery of the European Union, where desperate souls are risking all for a chance to live a life free of desperation. “Oh, I see what this part of the play means now! This means refugees,” says Sabina. “I’ll say the lines but I won’t think about the play. . . . And I advise you not to think about the play, either” (231). But, here in the audience, this reviewer was thinking about the play, Sabina, and thinking about how I would react. Would I be like George and welcome in the strangers or hesitate to help like Maggie or despise them like Sabina? Then I was thinking, wait, I already know, because I drive past such desperate souls at traffic intersections every day. Occasionally I’ll offer some money, but then sometimes I look away or roll up the window because the guy is not wearing his mask properly. So, what happens when you cannot roll up your window anymore, when the need is so great it is surrounding you on all sides? How much longer do we have before the need is at our actual door? Wilder’s play hits home.Up to this point this review might seem to present a strong justification for the continued inclusion of The Skin of Our Teeth in the dramatic canon. There is, however, an argument to be made—a strong one, even—that the canon itself needs to be deemphasized and decentered and that plays such as this need to take a backseat while other voices are heard. In the age of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, the American theater has undertaken much soul-searching as we have for many years centered whiteness and, generally, maleness. In particular, the American theater was called to task by an open letter in 2020 called “We See You, White American Theater,” which was signed by hundreds of prominent and preeminent BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) theater-makers. The laundry list of needed changes included in the letter were not phrased as requests, but as immediate demands—“principles for building anti-racist theatre systems.”To be fair, PlayMakers has been working toward many of these demands for years. One of the first acts Vivienne Benesch undertook as Producing Artistic Director was to paint over all the names of the classic plays and playwrights that adorned the walls of the extensive lobby in the Center for Dramatic Art, establishing a sort of symbolic blank slate. She has been committed to promoting work by women and people of color. So one might well wonder, and especially now with this “WSYWAT” letter lighting a fire under us all, why choose a play by a dead white guy for PRC’s triumphal return to the stage? And let us be honest: there are elements of the play that are quite dated, even paternalistic. Why is it that everyone looks to George—to a man, that is—to rebuild the world? That might have been the default way of thinking in 1942, but today we might just as well ask Maggie to do it. One can argue that the play centers whiteness, as it was originally intended for white actors, except for the “Negro Chair Pusher,” who delivers a single cringe-worthy line then ends up dead. The play is Eurocentric in that George turns to his books for inspiration in rebuilding the world, and they are explicitly Western philosophy and Judeo-Christian scripture. Thornton Wilder, as familiar as he was with Chinese culture, might just as well have had George pull out the Tao Te Ching, but he did not.This is not to defame or besmirch the name of Thornton Wilder, who was simultaneously forward-thinking and a product of his time. We need to deconstruct the regressive elements of the classics and the canon until we learn which works we can bend and adjust and which ones simply break under scrutiny. The fact that The Skin of Our Teeth can handle cross-racial casting and benefit by the new implications is a good sign. Another good sign is the fact that the Wilder Estate was willing to go along with Vivienne Benesch’s sensible, yet restrained, updates to the script. Such signs indicate that this play can still serve the progressive purpose for which the author intended it.When asked why they chose an old play by a dead white guy for Playmakers’ big return, Benesch said in an interview with this reviewer that she began with a similar logic to George Antrobus’s—that is, to rebuild, one must start from the most solid ground one knows. She said:Wilder never gives us a full answer or details on how to rebuild. How could any one person know? What he did know was that rebuilding was impossible without faith in the good of the future and trust in the good of the past.