Does a theatre company really need a Yale and Princeton-educated Shakespeare scholar on hand to make the production work?
Yes, though perhaps few companies can manage a dramaturg—it’s okay if you have to look it up– as that’s what she’s called, as qualified as Miranda Johnson-Haddad, who is now preparing for the upcoming production of Thorton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning allegory, “The Skin of Our Teeth,” set to open September 7th at A Noise Within.
We had the pleasure of cooling our heels in the theatre lobby with Johnson-Haddad this week as she prepares for the premiere which kicks off the company’s 2024-25 “True Grit” season.
“Dramaturg” may not be a word on the tip of many tongues today. “I love research,” she says, “and so usually in the second rehearsal, I start getting questions. And I live for those questions.”
The questions often have to do with placing the production in time. For a Shakespearean play, this placement requires an intimate grasp of Elizabethan social codes, mores and vernacular. Wilder’s play, though considered contemporary, is in fact long in the tooth at 82 years of age; the play debuted in 1942. So for a young cast, the world before Elvis and the Beatles, before LPs, cassette tapes, 8-tracks or CDs, before the internet, the polio vaccine, the Pill, Botox, hybrid vehicles and the cell-phone may seem as remote as that of Hamlet and Ophelia.
Her Ph.D in Renaissance Studies from Yale laid the groundwork for her becoming the “Shakespeare go-to” for A Noise Within and other literary and dramatic organizations. She has taught Shakespeare, drama and early modern literature at Howard University, UCLA, Vassar and Yale, and has written and edited numerous essay collections exploring Shakespeare in performance. Johnson-Haddad has consulted with A Noise Within since 2010, and more recently accepted the title of dramaturg at the start of the company’s 2022-2023 season. With characteristic modesty, she describes her function as one of being in service to the production.
The dramaturg role, she says, does not include making lots of suggestions, thus overstepping the function of the co-artistic directors Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott. By providing knowledge that grounds the production, she might be likened to a GPS system, or a North Star. This centering seems especially important for this play which, in spite of its popularity and longevity, remains open to interpretation. “I provide background and insight,” she says. “And I love digging into the historic aspects, including how a play, including this one, has been produced in the past. But my approach is always to trust the script, trust the material, and to trust the actors.”
She shudders visibly when she recounts that someone referencing a prior production of “The Skin of Our Teeth” described it as “an old chestnut.” Perhaps because of decades of folksy high school productions of Wilder’s earlier (and more easily digestible) “Our Town,” we may be tempted to simplify this playwright’s content into three acts of an avuncular Norman Rockwell homily. But Wilder has more in common with James Joyce, Brecht and Pirandello than Frank Capra. This is telegraphed in the very premise that George and Maggie Antrobus, the couple central to the story, have been married for 5,000 years—or does it just feel that way?
“Wilder was unnervingly prescient,” says Johnson-Haddad, a Pasadena resident. “The play opens as an ice age is threatening the planet, and there’s a rumor that a glacier has pushed the cathedral of Montreal into Vermont. That may have sounded comedic in 1942, though less so now. The character Sabina is sweeping the floor of a freezing house. Climate refugees, including Moses and Plato, along with stranded dinosaurs and woolly mammoths, come knocking at the door. It’s all kind of uncanny, and could not be more on point for today’s audience.”
In the second act, which takes place on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, animals are herded two-by-two onto a ship which may or may not be sinking, just one of many comedic-but-maybe-not-so-much Biblical and classical allusions that swirl through the script. “Wilder introduces his ordinary characters first as archetypes, but doesn’t stop there. We see them as real people, and the power of the play allows us to feel confusion, grief and hope along with them.” Wilder’s particular genius lies in his gimlet-eyed scrutiny of the mundane, demanding only the sparest of stage dressing, but never allowing the story to devolve into what the playwright dismissed as “the adulteries of dentists.”
Although a heterodox in opposition of the usual, “The Skin of Our Teeth” has generally been received as an upbeat message of hope, although those of us with a gloomier disposition may experience it more as an existential meditation on human futility. Haddad-Johnson allows that the play explores “the end of the world as we know it,” albeit it in hilarious terms. Subsequent generations of writers have followed Wilder’s lead, notably Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer character in “Annie Hall,” who as a Brooklyn schoolboy comes to learn that the universe is expanding, and in existential response stops doing his homework. “What’s the point?” he asks.
Here’s a slice from Wilder: in the third act, the protagonist addresses the audience directly, explaining that several of the actors have come down with food poisoning as the result of eating tainted lemon meringue pie. Wags might take this as a ham-handed metaphor for the spoilage of American society, the curdling of the American Pie itself, but the original audiences apparently didn’t take it that way.
In 1945, Sir Laurence Olivier directed Vivien Leigh as the enigmatic Lilith-Sabina in the London production. In 1946, the play was staged in a bombed-out, unheated theater in Darmstadt, Germany, where two years prior an estimated 12,000 people were killed and another 60,000 left homeless after a British air strike. The play traveled across Germany under the name “Wir sind noch einmal davongekommen” (“We Have Survived”), and has enjoyed popularity stateside ever since, including a 1955 production starring Mary Martin and Helen Hayes. Wilder’s humor, though mordant, keeps the proceedings from turning into a sodden mess, although tears are not unexpected as the house-lights come up.
As for those high school productions of 1938’s “Our Town,” it’s possible that some thespians and theatergoers are simply introduced to Wilder too soon to truly appreciate his nuance. Wilder described that earlier play as “…the life of a village against the life of the stars,” and the same may be said of “The Skin of Our Teeth,” the title snatched, incidentally, from the Book of Job.
Humanity suffers, always on the cusp of apocalypse.
“The play does confront the fact that societal violence begins in the family,” says Haddad-Johnson, “and yet, humanity goes on.”
DEETS
- “The Skin of Our Teeth” by Thorton Wilder
- September 7 through September 29
- Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 7:30 PM
- Saturday and Sunday matinee, 2:00 PM (No matinee Saturday, September 7, and dark Thursday, September 12)
- Four previews: Sunday, September 1, at 2:00 PM, Wednesday through Friday, September 4 through September 6, at 7:30 PM.
- A one-hour Insiders Discussion Group will take place prior to the matinee on Sunday, September 8, beginning at 12:30 PM.
- Post-performance conversations with the artists will take place every Friday (except the preview) and on Sunday September 15.
- For information about student matinees on weekdays at 10:30 AM, educators may email [email protected]
- Tickets to the previews on Wednesday, September 4 and Thursday, September 5 will be Pay What You Choose, starting at $10. Available online beginning at noon the Monday prior, and at the box office beginning at 2:00 PM on the day of the performance.
- Discounts are available for groups of 10 or more.
- A Noise Within
- 3352 East Foothill Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91107
- To purchase tickets, visit www.anoisewithin.org or phone 626-356-3100
