Theatre in Review: The Seat of Our Pants (Public Theater)In The Seat of Our Pants, the human race is rescued, repeatedly, from disaster. The show isn't so lucky. If Our Town is the Thornton Wilder play everyone produces, The Skin of Our Teeth is the one everybody wrestles with. A sprawling comic spectacle about humanity on the brink across many millennia, it has amused, inspired, and confounded audiences for eighty years. You either hate it or love it. (A director once told me that during the run of Elia Kazan's original production in 1942, New York cabbies knew to stop by the Booth Theatre at 10pm, catching the streams of bewildered patrons making a break for it after Act II.) As recent revivals have confirmed, it has a fascinating concept that is devilishly difficult to realize onstage. Nevertheless, valiant attempts have been made at musicalizing The Skin of Our Teeth. In the 1960s, Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green teamed up with director Jerome Robbins for a proposed production that was aborted after several months of work. (It did yield one lovely number, "Spring Will Come Again," which you can hear on YouTube.) According to Wilder's biographer Penelope Niven, Bernstein also pitched the playwright on an opera version and was turned down. A few decades later, Joseph Stein, John Kander, and Fred Ebb took a crack at it, variously titled The Skin of Our Teeth, Over and Over, and All About Us. It went through several readings and productions in Virginia and Connecticut before its creators gave up. Boldly setting forth where giants stumbled, the composer/librettist Ethan Lipton now offers his take. It's a big leap for an artist whose frequently charming pieces (We Are Your Robots, The Outer Space, and No Place to Go) have employed a loose-limbed, cabaret-style format making heavy use of direct address. According to the program notes, The Seat of Our Pants has been in development for ten years; the figure is alarming because -- there's no other way to say it - the piece is a total failure. Maybe it's just an impossible dream: The source material is a weird mix of domestic comedy and whimsical fantasy, with a dark undertone that muses on humankind's propensity for self-destruction. The leading characters, Mrs. and Mrs. Antrobus, are, basically, Adam and Eve rendered as archetypes of mid-twentieth-century middle-class Americans. (Their son, Henry, changed his name from Cain, following a fatal incident with his brother.) Keeping house for them is Sabina, a flirty flibbertigibbet and Mr. Antrobus' sometime mistress. We meet this menage three times: as the Ice Age is barreling toward their New Jersey home, in Atlantic City, as a hurricane of Noah proportions comes sweeping in; and in the aftermath of war, as they sort through the ruins and start again. The challenges are manifold: The play is an episodic epic, a trio of tableaux based on a circular notion of everyone repeatedly escaping mass destruction. It is filled with hard-to-realize notions, including dinosaurs roaming the stage and a convention of mammals. The actors are forever breaking character to complain about their lot; Sabina (or, rather, the actress allegedly playing her) is often in open revolt against the script. All these oddball comic touches sit beside elements of fratricide, betrayal, abandonment, and mass death, plus a father-son brawl that nearly ends in murder. Lipton's score can't begin to grapple with these clashing elements: The mildly jaunty tunes, which often have a Randy Newman-ish tone, never seem right for the characters and their frequently darker impulse. The pedestrian lyrics are starved for a kind of wit that might keep us engaged. Instead of transforming the play, the songs merely take up space. The production also suffers from the same problems as recent revivals: Its self-conscious humor is at odds with its old-fashioned characters. "Oh," complains Sabina, "why can't we have shows like we used to have? Come From Away and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Good honest entertainment with a message you can take home." It's an amusing update of a line that, in Wilder, namechecks those old warhorses Peg O' My Heart and The Bat. But Sabina doesn't update so easily; She is based on a vintage theatre convention --- the sexy, saucy maid -- that has gone out of style; sadly, nobody knows how to play a minx anymore. Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus are defined by dated gender roles: He represents the intellectual innovation that drives civilization (while sometimes straying with Sabina), while she is a pillar of home-and-hearth values. It's awkward when characters who are supposed to embody eternal truths feel like faded theatrical conventions. The director Leigh Silverman, usually adept at comedy, is at sea here, unable to deal with the action's rapidly shifting tone. The decision to stage the play with the audience on two sides results in awkward blocking. Trying to force Wilder's three-act structure into two acts sticks us with a stultifyingly long second act; even worse, the audience has to sit there, listening to music, watching the stagehands change over the set. This leaves scenic designer Lee Jellinek with little to work with; the design mostly consists of some shabby-looking walls. Lap Chi Chu's lighting captures the mood of each act, but at times neglects the actors' faces. Drew Levy's sound design is reasonably solid, although Andy Grotelueschen, who plays the Announcer, an emcee figure, is sometimes drowned out by the band (which is seated on two sides of the stage). Kaye Voyce's costumes have their moments, especially in the Atlantic City sequence. Some serious musical theatre talent has been assembled for this project, although no one is seen to their advantage. Shuler Hensley's stolid Mr. Antrobus only comes to life when engaging in fisticuffs with Henry (a sequence that, amusingly, appears to go off the rails, resulting in an intervention from stage management). Ruthie Ann Miles captures something of Mrs. Antrobus's role as the eternal hausfrau, but the role has a certain built-in drabness. Damon Daunno has one song, "Cursed with Urges," to make a case for Henry, and it doesn't pay off. Shorn of her calculatedly seductive technique, Sabina is a little shrewish, although, to be sure, Micaela Diamond lands some laughs. The role of Gladys, the Antrobus daughter, has always been a nonstarter, but Amina Faye lends her some presence. As a fortune teller and professional prophetess of doom, Ally Bonino lacks menace and color; then again, she is drably costumed, and her musical material suffers from repetitive lyrics. "I want to tell you that the news is good," sings the Announcer at the top of the show. "I want to shout it out in every neighborhood/But I can't lie to you." That's how I feel: The Seat of Our Pants is one of those unhappy events when a group of gifted people take on a project that simply goes bust. Oddly, the final number, "We're a Disaster," at long last catches Wilder's hopeful point of view; even with catastrophe looming, we are told, "But we know how to crack a joke/And we have made some dreams come true/And we are not here to surrender/We are here to rendez-vous." Rest assured, these fine talents will rise again. --David Barbour 
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