Word: wilderness
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...Skin of Our Teeth (by Thornton Wilder; produced by Michael Myerberg). In Our Town Thornton Wilder abolished space and expanded Main Street into the universe. In The Skin of Our Teeth he has annihilated time and turned the Antrobus family of Excelsior, N.J. into the story of mankind. But where Our Town, despite its reckless stagecraft, was a warm and human allegory nourished with cracker-barrel wisdom, The Skin of Our Teeth is a cockeyed and impudent vaudeville littered with asides and swarming with premeditated anachronisms. Dinosaurs collide with bingo; the Muses jostle the microphone...
Playwright Wilder is equally cavalier about the eternal verities. The Skin of Our Teeth is like a philosophy class conducted in a monkey house. In showing how man through the ages has escaped destruction by the skin of his teeth, the play tweaks his nose, barks his shins, musses his hair, gives him the hotfoot. It tweaks its own nose too: the philosopher implies he may be a monkey himself...
Already a center of controversy, Wilder's jumbled resume of man's history should mystify only those who worry their heads over hidden meanings instead of adjusting their imaginations to spectacular stagecraft. Perfectly clear, too, is Wilder's optimistic conclusion that mankind, for all its bad luck and narrow escapes, is indestructible...
There were signs last week that the Red Army was already preparing a winter offensive. Behind the German lines, on the Moscow front, guerrillas got busily to work. German reports described guerrilla activities as "fantastic exploits, comparable only to Fenimore Cooper's wilder stories...
...Ankara), Harry Zinder (in Cairo), Steve Laird (in London), Holland McCombs (in Rio), Bob Sherrod and Teddy White (in Australia), Felix Belair (in Washington) and 14 others who spoke from all sorts of unexpected places. And several times our editors (like Military Expert Roy Alexander, or Foreign News Editor Wilder Hobson) have gone on the air as news commentators to give you their expert judgment on some important development...