The Skin of Our Teeth director Dámaso Rodríguez has had a more than 20-year relationship with Thornton Wilder’s epic comedy. Seattle Rep sat down to chat with Dámaso about this theater lover’s “bucket-list” show, how this production is entirely unique, and more.

Seattle Rep: What is your history with this classic play?

Dámaso Rodríguez: I’ve been studying The Skin of Our Teeth since I first encountered this play 25 years ago as a directing intern at Los Angeles’ classical repertory theater, A Noise Within. (For the record, I played the Woolly Mammoth in that production.) I later produced and directed a production in 2016 during my tenure as Artistic Director of Portland, Oregon’s Artists Repertory Theatre. Today’s Seattle Rep production builds upon an approach to the play that I developed nearly a decade ago.

SR: Written in 1942, The Skin of Our Teeth was playwright Thornton Wilder's response to World War II. How do you see this play speaking to audiences today? Why this play, now?

DR: Like all enduring art, it contains varied layers of meaning and continues to resonate with universal truths about humanity’s complicated contradictions. Yet, the play’s primary purpose is to help us see the best in ourselves as a community. It celebrates our infinite capacity to learn, to love, and to begin again after adversity. It’s a play for times of collective anxiety and when the world is on the brink of change (like now!).

^{Members of the cast and team of The Skin of Our Teeth (2024) in rehearsal. Photo by Sayed Alamy.}

SR: From a directorial perspective, how are you approaching this piece? What are some unique differences in this production that audiences may not have seen elsewhere?

DR: Our production incorporates a “past, present, and future” approach to Wilder’s three-act cyclical structure, and takes the play’s “fourth wall”-breaking meta-theatricality as far as we can. Act One is set in 1963, the year Seattle Rep was founded. Act Two is set in the summer of 2024, and Act Three in a not-too-distant future (amid circumstances I won’t spoil here).

SR: Can you speak about the role of the Community Ensemble in this production?

DR: The plot of the play is at once about the Antrobus family facing ever-impending catastrophes through the millennia, but it’s also about a theater company struggling to perform through a series of succeeding mishaps. Today’s performance will feature a professional cast of 14 actors, supported by a rotating Community Ensemble of 12, and as many as 14 additional one-time-only walk-on performers. That’s up to 40 people on stage together each show in a one-of-a-kind performance that can never be duplicated—a modification that was enthusiastically approved by the Wilder Estate. We hope this community-engaged participatory approach makes each performance vividly live up to the play’s title and reminds us of the always ephemeral nature of theater.

^{Head Crafts Artisan/Dyer Brent Roberts working on costumes for The Skin of Our Teeth (2024). Photo by Sayed Alamy.}

SR: What do you hope audiences take away from this show?

DR: My favorite line is spoken by Mr. Antrobus late in the play. He says, “I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for—whether it’s a field, or a home, or a country.” When I hear this line, I always follow it in my mind with the added words, “or a THEATER!” I hope audiences will be inspired to think about the good and excellent things in our world and then work together to preserve them.

SR: Is there anything else you want audiences to know?

DR: Antrobus means “Human.” The Antrobus family is therefore meant to be the “Human Family” as we’ve evolved (or haven’t!) through the ages. The characters of George, Maggie, Henry, Gladys, Sabina, and others each at various moments in the play personify facets of human nature, from our civil, brave, generous, and loving virtues, to our selfish, petty, barbaric, and shameful vices. As the Fortune Teller will say in Act Two, “They are your hope. Your despair. Your selves.”

See The Skin of Our Teeth on stage at Seattle Rep from September 26–October 20, 2024.

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