(CHESTER, NJ) -- Chester Theatre Group presents The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder across three weekends from May 2-17, 2026. Combining farce, burlesque and satire, Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning play depicts an Everyman family as it narrowly escapes one end-of-the-world disaster after another, from the Ice Age to flood to war.
Meet George and Maggie Antrobus of Excelsior, New Jersey, a suburban, commuter-town couple (married for 5,000 years), who bear more than a casual resemblance to that first husband and wife, Adam and Eve; the two Antrobus children, Gladys (perfect in every way, of course) and Henry (who likes to throw rocks and was formerly known as Cain); and their garrulous maid, Sabina (the eternal seductress), who takes it upon herself to break out of character and interrupt the course of the drama at every opportunity (“I don’t understand a word of this play!”).
Whether he is inventing the alphabet or merely saving the world from apocalypse, George and his redoubtable family somehow manage to survive – by the skin of their teeth.
The production is directed by George LaVigne. The cast includes Thom Carroll (Mr. George Antrobus), Shail Choski (Homer/Tremayne), Ginny S. Crooks (Ms. E. Muse/Hester), Valerie Doran (Mrs. Maggie Antrobus), Tom Farber (Newscaster/Broadcast Official), Maren Heary (Gladys Antrobus), Karen Koronkiewicz (Ms. M. Muse/Bailey), Allana Mariano (Lilith Sabina), Alice Nemecek (Messenger/Ms. T. Muse/Ivy), Jason Perler (Moses/Chair Pusher), Cara Talty (Fortune Teller), Ross Weinberg (Henry Antrobus), and Michael Yoder (Mr. Fitzpatrick).
Performances take place May 2, 8, 9, 15, 16 at 8:00pm; May 3, 10, 17 at 2:00pm. Tickets are available for purchase online. The theater is located at 54 Grove Street in Chester, New Jersey.
Completed by the author less than a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) broke from established theatrical conventions and walked off with the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Combining farce, burlesque, satire, and elements of the comic strip, Thornton Wilder depicts an Everyman family as it narrowly escapes one end-of-the-world disaster after another, from the Ice Age to flood to war.
The Skin of Our Teeth premiered on Broadway at the Plymouth Theatre on November 18, 1942. Directed by Elia Kazan, the production featured Tallulah Bankhead as Sabina, Fredric March as Mr. Antrobus and Florence Eldridge as Mrs. Antrobus. A 1955 Broadway revival, directed by Alan Schneider, starred Helen Hayes, Mary Martin and George Abbott. A 1975 Broadway revival, directed by José Quintero, featured Elizabeth Ashley, Alfred Drake and Martha Scott. On April 15, 2022, the play returned to Broadway, produced by Lincoln Center Theater. Directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, the 2022 production featured Gabby Beans, Julian Robertson and Roslyn Ruff.
Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) is the only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes for both drama (Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth) and fiction (The Bridge of San Luis Rey). He collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock on Shadow of a Doubt, hiked the Alps with the heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney, received a bronze star for his service in World War II, and was credited with discovering Orson Welles. He was also a much-loved teacher, letter-writer (especially with Gertrude Stein), and public speaker – in four languages. Hello, Dolly! is based on his play The Matchmaker. Read more about his exciting life below.
Thornton Wilder, born in Madison, Wisconsin, and educated at Yale and Princeton, was an accomplished novelist and playwright whose works explore the connection between the commonplace and the cosmic dimensions of human experience. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of his seven novels, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, and his next-to-last novel, The Eighth Day, received the National Book Award (1968). Two of his four major plays garnered Pulitzer Prizes: Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1943). His play The Matchmaker ran on Broadway for 486 performances (1955-1957), Mr. Wilder’s Broadway record, and was later adapted into the record-breaking musical Hello, Dolly!
Mr. Wilder also enjoyed enormous success with many other forms of the written and spoken word, among them translation, acting, opera librettos, lecturing, teaching and film (his screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 psycho-thriller Shadow of a Doubt remains a classic to this day). Letter writing held a central place in Mr. Wilder’s life, and since his death, three volumes of his letters have been published.
Mr. Wilder’s many honors include the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Book Committee’s Medal for Literature. On April 17, 1997, the centenary of his birth, the US Postal Service unveiled the Thornton Wilder 32-cent stamp in Hamden, Connecticut, his official address after 1930 and where he died on December 7, 1975.
