A Noise Within has kicked off their 2024-25 “True Grit” season with a deliriously theatrical and irresistible production of Thornton Wilder’s 1942 Pulitzer Prize winning play, “The Skin of Our Teeth.”
Wilder’s absurdist time traveling play takes the audience on a wild and woolly journey following the Antrobus family as they muddle through world catastrophes like a wall of ice threatening their New Jersey home, an incoming flood in Atlantic City and the end of a long world war back at their post-war, tattered home. We watch as patriarch, Mr. Antrobus, toggles between despair and unbridled optimism as his stalwart wife tends to the actual day to day practicalities of survival. A pet dinosaur and woolly mammoth hang out in the living room as their sexy maid, Sabina, tends to everyone while breaking the fourth wall to inform us that she doesn’t even like a word of the play and has no interest in doing it! Yes, it’s all rather nuts and fantastically funny. So much so that when the poignant human moments come, it takes your breath away.
It feels incredible watching this piece to think it was written in 1942 because there is just so much that is relevant and timely and it’s such a wildly entertaining living testament to what theatre can do. What a breath of fresh air!
The whole design team of Frederica Nascimento (scenic), lighting designer Ken Booth, composer and sound designer Robert Oriol, costume designer Garry Lennon, and wig and make-up designer Tony Valdes breathe all the color and playfulness possible into the circus-like atmosphere where everything is just ever so askew as to suggest that we are all existing and surviving, well, by the skin of our teeth!
Frederick Stuart leads the stellar cast as a dashing and thoroughly stressed out Mr. Antrobus, with the divine Trisha Miller as a strong and steadfast Mrs. Antrobus. Ann Noble is saucily seductive and sassy as Sabina while Christian Henley is a surprisingly multi-faceted young Henry Antrobus. Mildred Marie Langford is delightful as daughter, Gladys, and Cassandra Marie Murphy and Kasey Mahaffy give pivotal performances as the fortune teller and stage manager respectively.
Directed by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliot, the play is deeply uplifting as it affirms humanity’s resilience and innate desire to survive the chaos and cling to those we hold dear.
Tickets to The Skin of Our Teeth start at $51.50 (including fees). Student tickets start at $20. Discounts are available for groups of 10 or more.
A Noise Within is located at 3352 E Foothill Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91107. For more information and to purchase tickets, call (626) 356–3100 or go to www.anoisewithin.org.
