Wilder's Mammoth Iceberg: How The Skin of Our Teeth Celebrates the Versatility of the Theatrical Form, Challenges Artists to Defy Convention, and Throws a Little Shade on the Well‐Made Play

ABSTRACT Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize‐winning play within a play, The Skin of Our Teeth , is a strangely structured and offbeat tale spanning several eras and multiple genres while breaking the standard conventions of “well–made” drama. This article will deconstruct Wilder's ambitious work, in an educational context, from the perspective of a playwright and the perspective of a director applying the critical lens of reception theory to develop an argument for why it is precisely plays of this kind—the plays that revel in their strangeness—that reaffirm theater's capacity for unique storytelling.