[Was Wilder serious] when he wrote The Skin of our Teeth thirty-five years' ago? It still gives off an endearing skittishness, though one suspects that the author of this 'history of mankind in comic strip' was being more serious than he dared to let on with his theme of mothers stabilising man's inherent waywardness and lust making the world go round. Whatever he meant,… [this boisterously facetious parable reminds us] how such a play, because of its fundamental thoughtfulness, can change its meaning from generation to generation….

Watching this absurdly typical American family facing suddenly up to the Ice Age, the invention (by father) of the wheel, worrying about Thurberish dinosaurs in the garden and coping with all those curious biblical parallels in such a modern, suburban context, who could not suppose that some magnificent meaning of other must be leaping out of Wilder's sugarcoated pill?

Besides, there...