Dates & Events

November 7-23, 2013

Chief Dan George Theatre

• Public Previews @ 8pm: November 5 & 6
• Evening Performances @ 8pm: November 7, 8*, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
  19, 20, 21, 22, 23
  
• Matinee @ 2pm: Saturday, November 23

Performances Tuesdays through Saturdays.

 

Listen to Lecture

FREE Preshow Lecture:

Directing and acting professor Linda Hardy spoke prior to the performance of The Skin of Our Teeth on Friday November 8th about Thornton Wilder's wondrous and revolutionary play and the many themes in this Pultizer Prize-winning American masterpiece. Click below to listen:

• Listen to the pre-show lecture:

Linda Hardy, Director

Linda is excited to be directing once again for the Phoenix season; especially as The Skin of Our Teeth is one of her favourite plays. She is also delighted to have such wonderful creative, design, and production talent on the project and such a willing and dedicated cast. Linda teaches Acting and Voice in the Department of Theatre and regularly mentors Graduate students in the MFA program in Directing. Throughout her career, she has worked both nationally and internationally as a Master Teacher of Acting and Voice and has been invited frequently as an Artist in Residence and Master Teacher to share her skills and knowledge around the world.  Her work ranges from showing actors in Beijing how to approach Western acting technique, to helping Thai singers in Bangkok achieve breath support to sing jazz, to rescuing Tibetan monks in New Delhi from vocal habits that lead to sore throats and laryngitis. This coming year she hopes to be on leave; so that she can get down to the book on Breath, Voice: Mind, and Body she is eager to write.

Director's Notes

Director’s Notes

As I write these notes, we are three-and-a-half weeks into production and I’m reflecting on the tremendous skills needed for the show and how much is required of these young actors to accomplish them. Moreover, I’m deeply grateful for having the likes of Jacques Lemay to help us with movement; Chari Arespachochaga to coach the puppeteers; and my colleague, Mary Kerr (once a majorette herself) to give the actors the fine points of the art of march and twirl—not to mention all the other splendid support we have in every area, from design, to props, to production, stage management, and front of house. All shows – but especially big ones –are a great reminder of what makes theatre irresistible to those who create it. It is a collaborative art form, and it is the collaboration that makes us richer for the experience. At its best, the teamwork is the magic of theatre.

This is something Thornton Wilder understood and celebrated. In The Skin of Our Teeth, he is not only writing an allegory about the human family and what qualities we need to survive and thrive in this topsy-turvy world, he is writing about a theatre company. This company reflects the values that guarantee we will pull through against all odds. In themselves, they exemplify the fortitude, determination, true-grit, and fellow feeling that we have come to understand as what is the best “us”. And, I believe, that Wilder also understood that we need these values reinforced through the theatre, especially in troubling times. The Americans had just come through the Depression “by the skin of their teeth” and were in the early throes of WWII when he wrote the play. They needed a reminder that humanity had faced far worse and somehow pulled through. They also needed inspiration. So, while he acknowledged that we are all flawed, he stuck to the premise that we nonetheless have it in us to make a better world. Even Sabina, the dyed-in-the-wool cynic in the play, acknowledges in the end, that progress may be possible.

I’ve wanted to do this play for a long time. The longer I’ve had to wait to do it at the Phoenix, the more relevant it seems to have become and the reasons for doing it more important within the context of awakening young minds to the human condition.

 
Linda Hardy

About the Playwright

Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) is one of America’s most accomplished novelists and playwrights. A graduate of Yale and Princeton, he was awarded his first Pulitzer Prize in 1928 for his novel The Bridge of Sans Luis Rey and later received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his classic work Our Town in 1938. Inspired after seeing Bertolt Brecht’s first production of Mother Courage in Switzerland in 1941 and completed on New Year's Day 1942 -- just after the attack on Pearl Harbour -- The Skin of Our Teeth went on to claim its own Pulitzer in 1943.

His play The Matchmaker ran for 486 performances on Broadway and was later adapted into the record-breaking 1964 Broadway musical Hello, Dolly!. Wilder was also a successful actor, teacher, lecturer, opera librettist, translator, and screenwriter, making his mark in the film industry with his classic screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock’s psycho-thriller, Shadow of a Doubt. Many other honours include the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His longest novel, The Eighth Day, went on to win the National Book Committee's Medal for Literature in 1967. Wilder’s work is continually read around the globe, with a production of Our Town being staged at least once a day somewhere in the United States.