In The Skin of Our Teeth—even more than in Our Town—Thornton Wilder broke through the fourth wall and emphasized the overt theatricality and metatheatricality of the dramatic form. The most obvious example is the character of Sabina, impertinent maid to the Antrobus family, whose ups and downs over 5000 years form the core of the plot. In a narrator-like role reminiscent of the Stage Manager in Our Town, Sabina speaks directly to the audience, guiding us through the play and, quite often, expressing her dissatisfaction with it. Additionally, in the third act, we learn that seven cast members have taken ill and are being replaced by various backstage personnel. With devices like these, Wilder never lets us forget that we are watching a play.Puppetry is not one of the devices Wilder calls for in his 1942 Pulitzer Prize-winning play. And Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre, where the play was recently produced, had never before used puppets in one of its productions. Director Noah Himmelstein, however, introduced puppets into Everyman’s production, and he did so not only to great effect, but also in a manner entirely in keeping with Wilder’s own approach.Himmelstein, together with gifted puppetry director and designer James Ortiz, achieved this by choosing styles that emphasized the mechanics of puppetry. Like the character of patriarch and inventor George Antrobus, Ortiz also revealed an inventive streak. He created hybrid styles, but whether part rod puppet or mostly Bunraku, his puppets shared a common trait: the puppeteer was always visible, making the artifice not only overt, but celebrated.A closer look at Ortiz’s creations highlights one of the most notable and distinctive elements of Everyman’s production. Besides their aesthetic impact, the puppets gave added meaning to the creatures they represented. In many productions of The Skin of Our Teeth—including director Jack O’Brien’s Old Globe production (televised on American Playhouse in 1983) and director Arin Arbus’s Theatre for a New Audience production in 2017—the dinosaur and mastodon in the first act were depicted by costumed actors.At Everyman, however, the puppets resembled large children’s toys with handles on their backs. They were adorable—the dinosaur was baby blue, with exaggerated eyes—and appeared trusting and innocent (Fig. 1). When Mrs. Antrobus shunted them out into the cold, it reaffirmed Sabina’s observation that this tigress of a mother would let nothing stand in the way of protecting her children (including sending their charming pets to certain death).Toward the end of the second act, when the flood began to overtake the convention of the “Ancient and Honorable Order of Mammals, Subdivision Humans,” in Atlantic City, giant rod puppets of whales, held aloft, glided across the set, beautifully illuminated by lighting designer Daisy Long. Mrs. Antrobus had expressed her desire to see whales, and as the family was loading the ark, the whales appeared, like a positive omen.The most expressive puppet of all appeared in the third act: daughter Gladys Antrobus’s baby. Usually just a bundle, at Everyman, the baby was the production’s Bunraku-inspired puppet—toddler-sized and doll-like—partly manipulated by rods, at times by two operators at once. The operators, especially ensemble member Hannah Kelly, imbued this wooden puppet with a startled, but curious personality that made it much more than a prop. As the Antrobus family’s next generation, Gladys’s unnamed baby represents the future (Fig. 2). Because it was not an inanimate bundle, the baby more clearly became the family’s next chapter, a visual representation of Sabina’s promise: “The end of this play isn’t written yet” (Collected Plays 284).Everyman’s production was the seventh Skin of Our Teeth I have seen (including the world premiere of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s musical, then called Over & Over, at Signature Theatre in Virginia). In his earlier one-acts, Wilder experimented with such bold techniques as incorporating a Stage Manager as a character (Pullman Car Hiawatha) and spanning extended periods of time (The Long Christmas Dinner). In The Skin of Our Teeth, he took these early experiments to new levels. The play is expansive and elastic enough—in terms of themes as well as plot and the passage of time—to accommodate carefully considered creative augmentations, such as songs, production numbers, and in Everyman’s case, puppetry. Indeed, Wilder’s focus on the script’s theatricality and its play-within-a-play structure is almost an invitation for artistic ingenuity.Thematically, Wilder presents a catalog of threats to the survival of the human race, threats that sadly still feel ripped from the headlines: climate change, homelessness, hunger, the plight of refugees, the aftermath of war, and senseless violence. Furthermore, seeing the play in the midst of COVID-19, its reference to the illness of seven actors jumped out as an eerie harbinger of the current state of theater, in which so many actors have been sidelined by COVID or COVID exposure.Designer Daniel Ettinger’s set for the first and third acts also had thematic resonance, accentuating the temporary nature of the so-called comforts of home. In the first act, Sabina was startled to see pieces of furniture suddenly shift out of place. In the third act, the walls of Ettinger’s set neatly fulfilled the stage direction, “SABINAhas found a rope hanging from the ceiling. . . . as she pulls the walls begin to move into their right places” (274). The rope, in full view of the audience, looked like stage rigging, another of Wilder’s reminders that we are watching a work of theater.Of course, the central characters are members of the all-American, middle-class, nuclear Antrobus family. Although three of the four family members bear the responsibility of representing Biblical figures (Adam, Eve, and Cain), they must also convey enough recognizable, modern-day human traits to make an audience care about their fate. At Everyman, Jefferson A. Russell and Beth Hylton effectively conveyed the familiarity of a very-long-married couple. Both actors, like eight of the production’s ten cast members, are part of Everyman’s resident company, a connection that builds onstage rapport.The flamboyant role of the maid, Sabina, originated by Tallulah Bankhead, was played by Felicia Curry with brashness, enthusiasm, and sarcasm—all hallmarks of this parody of a maid. Unlike a typical housekeeper cleaning up after her employers, Curry’s Sabina was often the engine—or at least an auxiliary engine—driving the play, an anarchic spirit readily inviting the audience to be in cahoots.Himmelstein trimmed Wilder’s original Broadway cast of thirty down to ten, multi-casting the ensemble members as a variety of characters. This further reinforced the play’s innate theatricality. As one example, Helen Hedman, an actor initially seen manipulating the dinosaur puppet, turned into Homer and then into an Atlantic City fortune teller and finally into the wardrobe mistress who is forced to fill in for one of the actors taken ill in the third act.The production’s overall impact, however, was lessened by too wide a disparity in tone between the first two acts and the third. Acts 1 and 2 were directed in a bright, antic manner that at times suggested a sitcom; this was particularly true of the vociferous depictions of Sabina and Mrs. Antrobus. The cartoony pitch of the first two acts made it difficult for the severity of the dark postwar third act to take hold.And yet, at the very end of the production, Himmelstein came close to redeeming this fissure with a strong, stark image. As the freshly recruited backstage crew spoke the words of Aristotle, Plato, and Spinosa—to which Himmelstein added quotes by Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin—all of the actors positioned themselves facing front. The unyielding effect exerted an almost magnetic pull on the audience. At once haunting and somehow hopeful, it was a parting image that ultimately included and implicated us all.