Rating: 
Summary: Anyone searching for some good plays?
Review: Thorton Wilder is one of the best playrights of his generation. This book brings together three of his best plays. "Our Town" which is a play centered around one town, and the way life can change within it. "the Skin of Our Teeth", which centers around one family that is going through all the changes that have ever happened in the world, including the ice age, world war 2, the depression, and so on. And finally "the Matchmaker" which is not the best play, but is still worth reading. Thorton Wilder does an amazing job with character developments and sub-plots, and these three plays really show his genius.
Rating: 
Summary: Looking Back at "The Skin of Our Teeth"
Review: With the centenary of Wilder's birth in 1997, the Yale Repertory Theatre mounted a production of "The Skin of Our Teeth," probably the first professional one it had seen (in this country, anyway) in twenty years. Encountering the play for the first time since reading it in high school, I was struck by its notorious alleged similarities to FINNEGANS WAKE, which got Wilder in trouble when Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson pointed them out upon the play's first production. Although Wilder scholars have always been heatedly hostile towards Campbell and Robinson, there is no doubt that the two men were right: "The Skin of Our Teeth" is obviously inspired by and much indebted to FW (it is probably going too far to call the play an adaptation of Joyce's novel), and anyone doing what Wilder did today would be accused of plagiarism and be sued (and lose). That said, the play can still hold the stage, although it is not as good a play as "Our Town," which uses the same modernist, fantastical conventions to much stronger effect. Does anyone actually read "The Skin of Our Teeth" these days, or do they buy the three-play book just for "Our Town"?
| 
