Review: The Seat of Our Pants Joins Thornton Wilder for a Song at the End of the World

By the time Thornton Wilder had opened The Skin of Our Teeth in 1942, the world had already ended a few times throughout history. Judging by his lemniscate of a play about a timeless family that muddles through the Ice Age, the Great Flood, and the Great War, he predicted the world would continue to end over and over—each time as devastating and absurd as the last.

Enter Ethan Lipton, the playwright/composer who’s decided to turn Wilder’s metatheatrical reflection on humanity’s cycles of destruction into a musical. “Songs!” shouts Sabina, Lipton’s version of the droll family maid at the center (Micaela Diamond, irritated to perfection). “Because that’s what it was missing.”

The Seat of Our Pants, now having its world premiere at the Public Theater, drops in a lot of these self-deprecating jabs. It even includes a substantial second-act explainer as if to give Wilder’s ghost a polite “pardon me” before bursting into his home to rearrange the furniture. That’s the hubris you’d expect of someone stepping over the threshold of a piece so sprawling and specific in its theatricality that it even caught its 2022 Broadway audiences by surprise (it had been nearly 50 years since the play’s antics had been seen on Broadway).

But by the end of The Seat of Our Pants’s three acts—the same structure as the original text—you find that Lipton has no interest in rearranging anything at all. With the utmost humility, hilarity, and confidence, his only wish is to pull up a chair for a chat with the source material—one apocalyptic era to another.

The ever-charming Andy Grotelueschen becomes Lipton’s avatar in the ensuing carnival act. He and the company welcome the audience with rollicking refrains of “the world is ending.” It’s an opening salvo with the warm camaraderie of a Rodgers and Hammerstein clambake, the satirical tone of a divorce party, and the melodic sensibilities of a bluegrass jam (Sunny Min-Sook Hitt’s simple choreography suits this quirky state fair). Everything from here on out is a cocktail of joy and dread, natural bedfellows in life that director Leigh Silverman manages to make just as cozy on stage.

Silverman and her extraordinary cast also deftly maneuver the play’s tricky world of archetypes. Act I—set in a hybrid dimension where modern-day New Jersey meets a Pleistocene-ish epoch where dinosaurs and mammoths coexist as house pets—introduces the prototypical Antrobus family. There’s Mrs. Antrobus (Ruthie Ann Miles), the nurturing mother; Mr. Antrobus (Shuler Hensley), the hard-working and often forbidding father; Henry (Damon Daunno), the trouble-making son; and Gladys (Amina Faye), the diligent daughter. Costume designer Kaye Voyce and scenic designer Lee Jellinek join forces with their ‘70s sitcom aesthetic, even dressing the band to match the kitschy patterned wallpaper (the musicians follow the changing scenery with new costumes for each subsequent act).

The Antrobuses play their parts while housekeeper Sabina panics about the oncoming wall of ice, though she quickly breaks the whole fragile illusion: “I hate this show and every line in it.” Sabina is there to be the audience’s gut check, and Diamond (a veteran of David Ives and Stephen Sondheim’s end-of-the-world musical Here We Are) does it brilliantly. She even makes the wit and wisdom in Wilder’s 83-year-old one-liners shine like new. Ironically, the songs her character so crabbily dismisses at the top of the show do a lot of the buffing as well. “The Wonderful Thing About Ice Cream,” which Diamond sings in Act III as a not-quite-hardened post-war Sabina, spins a Wilder quote into a moment of Proustian nostalgia. It’s simple and silly and beautiful.

Lipton’s greatest strength is finding moments like these in Wilder’s text to expand with music (Daniel Kluger’s orchestrations bring the simple tunes to life) and he has the benefit of actors who can deliver character and commentary at the same time. Miles is as funny as she is heartbreaking in “Stuff It Down Inside,” an ode to the mother swallowing her feelings in the face of catastrophe. Daunno gives the same treatment to his Cain-coded character in “Cursed With Urges,” a punk-rock Act II number about a disappointing son betrayed by his biology (a particularly raucous moment for the constantly shape-shifting lighting by Lap Chi Chu and sound design by Drew Levy).

By the time Faye, as golden child Gladys, blasts her father with her powerful pipes in “Poisoned My World,” the limitations of our all-American heroes light up like a Christmas tree (the always larger-than-life Hensley, President Antrobus in Act II, leans into his character’s dangerous arrogance). You don’t even need the Fortune Teller to portend the demise of this “great man,” but it’s worth every second to hear a witchy Ally Bonino belting the inevitable consequences of bad posture and alcohol consumption across the Atlantic City boardwalk—hilarious warnings when the Flood is moments away.

Of course, if you’ve been listening, the proverbial Flood is always moments away. Before Bonino was the Fortune Teller, she was a displaced woman leading her fellow refugees in the prayerful Act I closer “Into the Darkness” as they await the approaching ice. The world is constantly on the brink of destruction, and it will never stop finding new and creative ways to combust. It’s small comfort in the face of macabre Wilder aphorisms like, “In the midst of life we are in the midst of death.” The Seat of Our Pants lets you go ahead and cry about it but makes sure you leave laughing.