Word: skin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Skin of Our Teeth (by Thornton Wilder; produced by Michael Myerberg). In Our Town Thornton Wilder abolished space and expanded Main Street into the universe. In The Skin of Our Teeth he has annihilated time and turned the Antrobus family of Excelsior, N.J. into the story of mankind. But where Our Town, despite its reckless stagecraft, was a warm and human allegory nourished with cracker-barrel wisdom, The Skin of Our Teeth is a cockeyed and impudent vaudeville littered with asides and swarming with premeditated anachronisms. Dinosaurs collide with bingo; the Muses jostle the microphone...
Playwright Wilder is equally cavalier about the eternal verities. The Skin of Our Teeth is like a philosophy class conducted in a monkey house. In showing how man through the ages has escaped destruction by the skin of his teeth, the play tweaks his nose, barks his shins, musses his hair, gives him the hotfoot. It tweaks its own nose too: the philosopher implies he may be a monkey himself...
Provocative, unusual, but often unsatisfying, The Skin of Our Teeth dolls up its theme rather than dramatizes it. The fourth dimension somehow stays apart from the other three. Hocus-pocus and moral never quite blend. But the hocus-pocus-with superbly vivacious Actress Bankhead handing most of it out-is often extremely funny. "I hate this play," she suddenly confides. "That's the worst line I've ever had to say on any stage," she complains wearily; but she never spoke one better...
...captain in Air Forces Intelligence since last June, Wilder got his first stage look at The Skin of Our Teeth at a preview two days before it opened...
Nothing brings out the artist in able Painter Julien Binford like a chocolaty skin. His Negroes are something that Negroes admire. Sixteen new Binfords made his one-man show last week at Manhattan's Midtown Galleries look like a black-belt village on Saturday afternoon. The canvases showed Negroes playing harmonicas, shooting craps, teaching Sunday school, and a vigorous study of two bucks locked together in a razor fight (one of Painter Binford's childhood memories). In most of these pictures, somber tones of the sooty bodies and faces stood out in contrast to the brilliant light...