About the work
The Skin of Our Teeth is a three-act play by Thornton Wilder. It premiered at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven on 15 October 1942, and its German-language premiere followed on 16 March 1944 at the Schauspielhaus Zürich.
Plot
The Antrobus family of suburban Excelsior — whose members also evoke Adam, Eve, Cain and Lilith — successively survive an ice age, a flood and a war. After each catastrophe, the family, aided by their resourceful maid Sabina, starts over again, forever escaping "by the skin of their teeth".
Cultural significance
The play won Wilder his third Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1943 and, with its repeated breaks in stage illusion, is regarded as one of the formally boldest American plays of its era. In postwar Germany it was widely staged and received as a hopeful "pageant of humanity".