Old Skin, New Vim

Most Broadway offerings are based on the obvious notion that a show is not worth producing unless it promises to enrich its backers as a long-run hit. Last week, however, Broadway blossomed with a smash hit that broke rules, and may break records. The American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) opened its revival of Thornton Wilder's timeless piece of vaudevillian anthropology. The Skin of Our Teeth, first produced in 1942 (and greeted by a mixed chorus of cheers and catcalls--plus a Pulitzer Prize). The ANTA production's glittering stars: the U.S. theater's Grande Dame Helen Hayes and Producer-Director-Playwright George Abbott as mankind's eternal Mr. and Mrs.; Musicomedienne Mary Martin as Mr. and Mrs. maid and humanity's eternal hedonist, raising hell in halcyon eras and doubting heaven in adversity.

Generic George. Though Skin could probably play to full houses for the rest of this year, it is scheduled to close in September after only 23 performances. With hardly a line deleted or dinosaur added, Wilder's drama is in a sense better than it was 13 years ago. His tearfully laughable story of mankind, allegorically and often outlandishly larded into the daily life of Mr. and Mrs. George Antrobus of Excelsior, N.J.. is just the same. What has changed, in hot war and cold, is the audience. Today's playgoers, themselves survivors of some close shaves, can sympathize more feelingly, even in the shadow of a mushroom cloud, with generic George Antrobus as he survives not only a war but an ice age, the Flood, and his own folly as well.

Such a play, ANTA Producer Robert Whitehead reasoned last April, might prove a special tonic for the peril-surfeited people of France. He hand-picked Skin as his own pet project for inclusion in a "Salute to France." This cultural export (financed by thousands of U.S. donors) plunked down before Parisians the Philadelphia Orchestra. New York City Ballet, two U.S.-sponsored art shows, plus first-class stage productions of Oklahoma! and Medea (TIME, June 6).

Wild Wilder. Skin turned out to be, in six full-house performances, the dramatic showpiece of Salute. Salute marked the first invasion of the laggardly U.S. onto a critical cultural battlefield of the cold war. Skin opened after only two hectic rehearsals in its Paris theater. Some 200 sittie-talkies caught a running translation for its French-speaking viewers. In general, Paris critics raved, though a few found it "furiously intellectual'' or "slightly incoherent."

In Chicago, and Washington, D.C., where it toured, and back home in Manhattan, audiences have hailed Skin ever since. Cried the New York Times's persnickety Brooks Atkinson, dean of Broadway's critics, "Perfect.'' Rejoiced the Herald Tribune's Walter Kerr: "Perhaps even the theater will survive.'' Thornton Wilder's wild and wise romp is now fast making up the $73,000 deficit incurred by Salute. Best news of all: Salute should be completely out of the red after the U.S. at large gets its chance to see The Skin of Our Teeth as an NBC-TV Spectacular, Sept. 11,7 130 p.m. E.D.T.

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