The Seat Of Our Pants
Adaptation, Music, and Lyrics by Ethan Lipton; Based Upon the Play The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder; Choreography by Sunny Min-Sook Hitt; Directed by Leigh Silverman
The Newman Theater at The Public Theater | 425 Lafayette Street. (At Astor Place). New York, NY 10003
October 24 - December 7
Photos by Joan Marcus.
By the time Thornton Wilder unveiled The Skin of Our Teeth in 1942—amid a world already cracking under the weight of its own accumulated catastrophes—he seemed to understand with chilling, almost clairvoyant clarity that human history is less a straight march forward than a looping lemniscate of folly. Across Ice Ages, deluges, and wars both great and petty, Wilder’s eternally muddling Antrobus family embodied the perpetual, exasperating rebirth of hope in the face of cyclical annihilation.
Into this daunting inheritance strides Ethan Lipton—playwright, composer, and theatrical merry-maker—who has elected not merely to adapt Wilder’s metatheatrical pageant but to musicalize it. “Songs!” shrieks Sabina—here played with deliciously irritated precision by Micaela Diamond—as if announcing, with trademark exasperation, the very act of dramaturgical sacrilege Lipton is committing. Indeed, The Seat of Our Pants, now unfurling its world premiere at the Public Theater, is positively studded with these gleefully self-flagellating acknowledgments of its own audacity. Lipton even pauses for a generously sized second-act apologia, a sort of tasteful tapping on Wilder’s spectral shoulder before intruding upon the immaculate living room of theatrical history.
And yet—and here is the paradox that gives Lipton’s undertaking its peculiar shimmer—he is not, in the end, rearranging the furniture at all. After three acts (honoring Wilder’s triptych structure with almost monastic fidelity), it becomes clear that Lipton approaches his source text not as a restless renovator but as a courteous conversationalist: pulling up a chair across epochs and apocalypses to speak, to listen, and to harmonize.
For the Antrobus family, calamity is less an aberration than a recurring visitor—a relentless drumbeat of existential alarms. Each crisis arrives with the full fanfare of the world’s imminent demise, and each improbable survival—whether through an encroaching Ice Age, a cataclysmic flood, or the scorched aftermath of global war—offers the faint yet persistent glimmer of renewal, that elusive promise to begin again upon the ruins.
In Leigh Silverman’s deftly orchestrated production of this new musical, that fragile ember of hope is given buoyant, almost effervescent life through Lipton’s irresistibly upbeat score. His songs, eclectic in lineage and charm, ricochet from vaudevillian mischief to high-plains Western balladry to sly, syncopated jazz excursions. The effect is a kaleidoscopic musical landscape in which optimism—however battered, however improbable—continues to shimmer through the cracks, refusing, with Wilder-like tenacity, to be extinguished.
Perhaps it was always destined to be an impossible dream, or at least a quixotic one: Wilder’s source material is an eccentric admixture of domestic comedy, whimsical myth-making, and philosophical shadowplay, forever ruminating on humanity’s baffling compulsion toward its own undoing. At its center stand Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus, figures who are less characters than grand archetypes—Adam and Eve reimagined as mid-twentieth-century, middle-class Americans, clad in cardigan and apron, yet burdened with the primordial weight of Genesis. Their son, Henry—once Cain, rechristened only after a certain fratricidal “incident”—carries history’s first sin like a restless ember in his pocket. Orbiting this fragile familial solar system is Sabina, the housemaid who is equal parts coquettish gadfly, theatrical anarchist, and Mr. Antrobus’s sometime paramour. She is the meddling sprite who both tends the household and gleefully tears at its seams.
Humanity, Wilder suggests, is forever starting over—forever sweeping the stage and replacing the scenery, even as the next catastrophe queues itself in the wings. Lipton merely opens the curtain a little wider. At the center of this gleeful end-times carnival stands the ever-magnetic Andy Grotelueschen, Lipton’s onstage avatar. He ushers us in with a chorus of “the world is ending,” a refrain rendered with the conviviality of a Rodgers and Hammerstein clambake gone slightly mad, tinged by the rueful festivity of a divorce soirée and underscored with the porch-stomp twang of a bluegrass jam. Sunny Min-Sook Hitt’s breezily unfussy choreography rounds the edges of this oddball jamboree, while Leigh Silverman’s direction enfolds the show’s oscillating tones—joy and dread in wedded, almost domestic coexistence—into one uncommonly cozy theatrical embrace.
The most felicitous pleasure of The Seat of Our Pants is the altogether luminous performance of Ruthie Ann Miles as that mother of all theatrical mothers, Mrs. Antrobus. Miles imbues Mrs. Antrobus with a warm, devastating gravity and appears before us as a brisk, reassuring, impeccably composed figure—every pleat in place, every gesture calibrated with the unshowy precision of a woman who has weathered catastrophes both domestic and cosmic. Her voice, warm and pellucid, moves through Lipton’s score with a tender clarity that belies the steely ferocity beneath: she suggests, with a glinting subtlety, the archetypal tiger mother who would annihilate any threat—Ice Age, deluge, or errant dinosaur—that dared approach her children.
Like the countless wives and maternal titans her character distills, Miles becomes the quiet architecture upon which the household (and indeed the production) rests. Her performance serves as a kind of gravitational anchor, offering steadfast ballast to Shuler Hensley’s poignant Mr. Antrobus—a man forever teetering between visionary ambition and existential exhaustion, looming large, a patriarch equal parts benevolent and thunderously forbidding. In Miles’s hands, Mrs. Antrobus is no mere helpmeet but a mythic force of constancy, the sturdy trellis against which Hensley’s wandering patriarch leans, falters, and finds his shape.
Damon Daunno’s Henry smolders with Cain-like volatility; and Amina Faye’s Gladys glows with industrious, ingénue earnestness. Costume designer Kaye Voyce and scenic designer Lee Jellinek lace the entire affair with a lovingly garish 1970s-sitcom aesthetic—kitschy wallpaper, pattern-on-pattern ensembles, and even a band whose costumes morph in tandem with each act’s shifting topography.
Hovering above and around this domestic hearth is Sabina, the household maid who serves as the production’s chorus, conscience, and gleeful saboteur. Diamond is sensational, embodying Sabina’s mutinous spirit with a deadpan virtuosity that makes Wilder’s octogenarian wisecracks gleam anew. Her exasperation toward Lipton’s musical embellishments proves gloriously ironic, for those very songs heighten and deepen the emotional textures of the narrative. “The Wonderful Thing About Ice Cream,” which Diamond sings as a post-war Sabina in Act III, turns a Wilder aphorism into a gently absurdist meditation on memory—a scoop of Proustian longing served with sprinkles.
Lipton’s greatest triumph lies in his ability to identify latent pockets of emotional resonance within Wilder’s text and aerate them with music. Daniel Kluger’s orchestrations lend modest melodies a lived-in warmth, while the cast’s performances bridge character and commentary with elegant simultaneity. Miles’s “Stuff It Down Inside,” a mordantly funny hymn to maternal emotional suppression, is as heartbreaking as it is sly. Daunno catapults his Act II number, “Cursed With Urges,” into a punk-rock howl—a son’s lament, bruised by biology and blazing with Lap Chi Chu’s frenetic lighting and Drew Levy’s electrifying sound design.
When Faye, as golden-child Gladys, releases a torrent of righteous indignation in “Poisoned My World,” the myth of the American patriarch shatters spectacularly. Hensley, now inflated into the blustering President Antrobus of Act II, leans into the dangerous swagger of a man convinced of his own indispensability. Meanwhile, Ally Bonino’s Fortune Teller—witchy, wry, and gloriously over-caffeinated—prophesies doom with warnings so mundane (poor posture! alcohol!) that they circle back to the hilarious just moments before the literal Flood descends upon Atlantic City.
But then, the deluge is always descending. Bonino, before donning her fortuneteller’s trappings, closes Act I as a refugee leading “Into the Darkness,” a hymn of quiet terror as the ice creeps ever closer. Wilder understood, and Lipton affirms, that human life is lived on the cusp of collapse. The Flood, the Ice, the War—they are perpetually imminent, perpetually recurring.
And yet—miraculously, maddeningly—we endure. The world, Wilder reminds us, is forever ending; Lipton reminds us it is also forever singing. The Seat of Our Pants invites us to weep at the absurdity of it all—but ensures, with great tenderness and even greater mischief, that we leave the theater laughing through our tears.
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Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on November 23, 2025 All rights reserved.