Surrealistic, seemingly-crazy Wilder concept comes to the stage in Tucson

A plot reading of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth” is likely to leave you scratching your head. It can come across as convoluted, even crazy.

What you need to do to understand the strength and brilliance of this play is see it on stage. And, lucky you, you can see it now at The Rogue Theatre. Joseph McGrath’s direction gives the 1942 play the clarity, humor and, yes, power, it deserves.

“The Skin of Our Teeth” premiered a year after the start of World War II. Thornton reflects that dark time and yet this play is timeless.

It follows the Antrobus family from the ice age on. Really.

In the first act, Mrs. Antrobus (a perfectly prim and complex Carley Elizabeth Preston) waits for her husband (an always-insightful Matt Wallley) to come home from a long day’s work. He has been busy inventing the alphabet and the wheel so it’s been an exhausting time. But it all may be for naught: the Earth is getting so cold that even a mammoth and a dinosaur come in to sit by the fire in the Antrobus’ suburban home.

Also crowded into that home is the maid, Sabina (a saucy Chelsea Bowdren) and the Antrobus’ children, the desperate-to-please Gladys (finely played by Sophie Gibson-Rush) and Henry (a scary Hunter Hnat), who killed his brother, has an angry C-shaped scar on his forward and who hates it when people call him by his former name, Cain. Henry’s anger is bottomless. That first act ends as they are desperately trying to find wood to build the fire that will keep them warm and alive.

Thousands of years later, we find them all at a convention in Atlantic City, where sheets of rain won’t let up. The act ends with Sabina and the Antrobus family loading animals, two of each, onto a boat.

And the last act, another thousands of years later: war has just ended.

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Desperation and darkness are beginning to lift. But there is still the threat of evil — Henry, after all, has returned home after having fought on the opposite side of his father. He wasn’t able to destroy his dad in war, so he has come home to do that.

Oftentimes, actors break the fourth wall to comment on, or explain what’s going on. It is a technique Wilder often used, and it adds humor and helps to explain what’s going on at times.

While awful things have happened in this play, Wilder has woven in hope, ways to begin again. It is displayed in the words of the great philosophers, which Mr. Antrobus clings to throughout. It is there, too, in the small kindnesses and the family core that is carried through the ages. We are resilient, Wilder says, we must not give in to despair.

See? It’s hard to explain. You have to suspend belief to buy into Wilder’s often surrealistic and seemingly-crazy concept.

But do it. You will be hugely rewarded after seeing this Rogue production.

“The Skin of Our Teeth” continues through Sept. 29 at The Rogue Theatre, 300 E. University Blvd. in the Historic Y. Tickets are available by calling 520-551-2053 or visiting theroguetheatre.org. Run time is about 2½ hours, with one intermission.