The Skin of Our Teeth is a play by Thornton Wilder that won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It opened on October 15, 1942, at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, before moving to the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway on November 18, 1942. It was produced by Michael Myerberg and directed by Elia Kazan with costumes by Mary Percy Schenck. The play is a three-part allegory about the life of mankind, centering on the Antrobus family of the fictional town of Excelsior, New Jersey. The epic comedy-drama is noted as among the most heterodox of classic American comedies — it broke nearly every established theatrical convention. The phrase used as the title comes from the King James Bible, Job 19:20: "My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth." Overview The main characters of the play are George and Maggie Antrobus (from (anthropos), "human" or "person"), their two children, Henry and Gladys, and Sabina, who appears as the family's maid in the first and third acts, and as a beauty queen temptress in the second act. The play's action takes place in a modern setting, but is full of anachronisms reaching back to prehistoric times. The characters' roles as archetypes are emphasized by their identification with Biblical and classical personalities: The name Lilly Sabina is a reference to the myth of Lilith and to the historical rape of the Sabine women, identifications made relatively explicit in the play's text. Henry Antrobus's name was changed from "Cain", following his murder of his brother Abel, mirroring the biblical story in which Adam's son murders his brother after God favors Abel over Cain by gifts. This implies that George Antrobus is Adam, and Maggie Antrobus Eve, supported when George composes a song for his wife Maggie in honor of their anniversary: "Happy w'dding ann'vers'ry dear Eva." The murder of Abel is an underlying theme in the play. Mr. Antrobus pays far more attention to his "perfect" third child Gladys than he does Henry. As this treatment of Henry continues, Henry's anger progresses throughout the play, reaching its climax in the third act. While the Antrobus family remains constant throughout the play, the three acts do not form a continuous narrative. The first act takes place during an impending ice age; in the second act the family circumstances have changed as George