urban excavations

The Seat of Our Pants
Featuring Micaela Diamond, Shuler Hensley, Ruthie Ann Miles
The Public Theater
October 24, 2025 – December 7, 2025 [extension]
production site

The Seat of Our Pants, Ethan Lipton’s new musical version of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, tracks the Antrobus family over their 5,000-year slog through existential dread, catastrophes, and a mammoth. Writer-composer-performer Ethan Lipton has applied his quirky observational style and gentle folksy bluesy musical sensibilities to Wilder’s 1942 allegory with clarifying and truly entraining results.

The Antrobus family is headed by Mrs. (Ruthie Ann Miles) and Mr. (Shuler Hensley), their servant Sabina (Micaela Diamond), son Henry (Damon Daunno), daughter Glady (Amina Faye), and an announcer of scenes and tunes (Andy Grotelueschen), and of course Mammoth (Geena Quintos).

This adaptation of Wilder’s metatheatrical The Skin of Our Teeth (that allegorical representation of humanity’s struggle for survival against catastrophes both natural and manmade) is clarifying and perhaps variously successful. Here the anchor, our rock, is Mrs. Antrobus who keeps the action moving, while maintaining her comedic sensibilities and her warmth. In the second act a Fortune Teller (Ally Bonino) sings a tune of gloom and doom, and some ensemble numbers for various cast members — Henry doing a punk tune, Sabina and Mr. Antrobus duetting in a kind of seduction — make the second act more vaudeville than dramedy.

Direction by Leigh Silverman, Lipton’s frequent collaborator, keeps the three acts afloat, each feeling like a very different world and sensibility. Lighting by Lap Chi Chu haunts and creates soap opera, intimacy, and spot lit dance numbers to equal love effect. (The lighting of a grief-striken Mrs. Antrobus in Act I deserve special notice.) The set by Lee Jellinek offers camp fires and wild wall paper and furniture that serves and odd pieces that collapse and reassemble.

A worthy attempt to wrestle an unwieldy work of theatrical art into something that works as a book for a 21st century musical musing on the fate of the world and the humans who live her. The company sings to us a final word, the guidance offered by Wilder through Lipton. “We start anew. Its what we do.”

© Martha Wade Steketee (November 17, 2025)

Adaptation, Music, Lyrics | Ethan Lipton
Director | Leigh Silverman
Choreography | Sunny Min-Sook Hitt
Set Design | Lee Jellinek
Costume Design | Kaye Voyce
Lighting Design | Lap Chi Chu
Sound Design| Drew Levy