“The Skin of Our Teeth,” A Noise Within, Pasadena, Sept. 1-29, 2024 “Cyrano de Bergerac,” Pasadena Playhouse, Sept. 4-29, 2024
September 11, 2024 | By Bruce R. Feldman
In Brief: Two classic plays, both alike in celebrity, in Pasadena. One production is reverential, the other is a triumph of imagination, audacity, and poetry.
The cast of "The Skin of Our Teeth" at Noise Within (Photo: Craig Schwartz)
It’s September and the new Southern California theatre season is just getting underway. Another road company of Hamilton is at the Pantages this month. New productions are due soon at the Geffen Playhouse and Odyssey Theater.
The hit satire Whittier Boulevard returns to the Los Angeles Theater Center in a few days, while the Mark Taper Forum remains dark until American Idiot opens in October.
The real action, this week at least, is in Pasadena where notable new stagings of The Skin of Our Teeth and Cyrano de Bergerac are on offer.
The Skin of Our Teeth
“The theater has lagged behind the other arts in finding the ‘new ways’ to express how men and women think and feel in our time.”
The cast of "The Skin of Our Teeth" at Noise Within (Photo: Craig Schwartz)
Thornton Wilder expressed this view in the introduction he wrote for the volume of three of his plays that was published in 1957. Two of the plays, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, already were classics of the American theater.
The third, The Matchmaker, would go on to become the basis for Hello, Dolly, one of the most successful Broadway musicals ever. The royalties he earned provided Wilder with financial security for the rest of his life and, likely, for the entire lives of his heirs, as well.
The Skin of Our Teeth was one of the most unorthodox productions that Broadway audiences would have seen in 1942. It remains something of a curiosity today.
Wilder contrived a host of eccentricities to challenge his audience and give vent to his strong social views. Actors frequently stepped out of character to address the audience. The three acts don’t follow any logical timeline or realistic narrative.
The Antrobus family – father, mother, a son, and a daughter – is living, as Wilder wrote, in “two times at once…in prehistoric times and in a New Jersey commuters’ suburb today.”
So, what is going on here? Perhaps it’s best to let Wilder tell us. “The events of our homely daily life,” he expounded, “are depicted against the vast dimensions of time and place. It was written on the eve of our entrance into the war and under strong emotion and I think it mostly comes alive under conditions of crisis.”
This illuminates his allegorical intent, the zeitgeist of the moment, and the experimental nature of the narrative. Executing it successfully on stage is another matter.
Wilder was lucky. He could be as daringly outrageous, non-linear, and wacky as he wanted because he was given an exceptional cast that included Tallulah Bankhead, Frederick March, the Broadway diva Florence Eldridge, and an unknown Montgomery Clift.
Guiding this stellar ensemble was the intense, brilliant young director Elia Kazan, who would next direct Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and go on to make landmark films of the 1950s and ‘60s.
Flash forward to Pasadena in 2024 and A Noise Within’s ambitious production of Wilder’s disjointed comedy.
This new restaging isn’t up to the demands of Wilder’s weird material. The direction, by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott, feels more earnest than inspired. While the acting is always professional, the performances lack the kind of spark and wizardry required to make the proceedings soar.
The show does succeed admirably in underscoring the spiritual aspects of Wilder’s text.
Still, this production is gratifying enough and very watchable, especially if you have never seen Wilder’s work on stage before or if you want to get a glimpse into what one of our greatest literary minds was thinking at a pivotal moment in the last American century.
Cyrano de Bergerac
On the other hand, there’s very little to quibble about and a great deal to admire in Mike Donohue’s lyrical, energetic, all-around stunning rethinking of Cyrano de Bergerac at the Pasadena Playhouse.
Chukwudi Iwuji leads the cast of "Cyrano de Bergerac" at Pasadena Playhouse (Photo: Jeff Lorch)
Praise first goes to Martin Crimp’s freewheeling adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s beloved 1897 drama. It’s above all a feast for the ears, updating the original in gorgeous, glorious raps and rhyming couplets that feel bracingly fresh while retaining all of Rostand’s emotion and romanticism.
The emphasis now is firmly on Cyrano’s love of language and the way he uses words to express his intensely felt emotions, unfulfilled longings, and deep-seated insecurities and resentments. Crimp makes this undeniably clear at the play's curtain line.
All of Donohue’s artistic choices underscore this, too. The period embellishments are gone. The stage is bare except for a few props. The movement is naturalistic, not florid. The costumes are contemporary, nothing visually fussy or fancy.
Also noteworthy: Cyrano’s titanic nose is nowhere to be seen. Crimp and Donohue want us to imagine it. This may be the only time you will see a production of Cyrano without that famous titanic beak.
Rosa Salazar and Chukwudi Iwuji in "Cyrano de Bergerac" (Photo: Jeff Lorch)
With little to distract the eye, it’s up to the actors to bring the language, story, and underlying passion and frustration to life. The diverse cast is up to the task. It’s a group of exceptionally talented and appealing actors, starting with a magnificent, expressive Chukwudi Iwuji in the title role.
Rosa Salazar is equally wonderful as Roxane. She’s good-looking but not in the usual beauty pageant way. Hers is an earthy, strong-willed beauty. She’s fierce, intense, independent. She loves literature and ideas at least as much as Cyrano. That’s their mutual attraction.
Also worth mentioning is Michael Nathanson as De Guiche, who starts off as a tyrant and then softens into a likable guy; Kimberly Scott, a dependable, sympathetic Madame Ragueneau; and Larry Powell, who as Lignière is winning even though he appears only at the beginning and in the resonant final scene of the play.
It’s not often you get to experience a familiar classic in a way that speaks to today’s sensibilities, to what modern audiences want from the theater. This Cyrano does. It’s thrilling and moving. Go see it.
“The Skin of Our Teeth,” A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91107, (626) 356-3100, www.anoisewithin.org
“The Sound Inside,” Pasadena Playhouse, 39 South El Molino Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91101, 626-356-7529, pasadenaplayhouse.org
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