The Off-Broadway Theatre Review: Public Theater’s The Seat of Our Pants

By Ross

There’s something extravagantly delightful and frankly miraculous about watching a show fully understand the impossible text it’s adapting, then gleefully calling itself out on the absurdity. The Seat of Our Pants, the new musical premiering at the Public Theater, does just that, attacking, with pleasure, Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. It’s completely self-aware, bordering on some kind of spiritual liberation in the way that it embodies and embraces the big, messy, knowingly ridiculous origin text as it performs the framework with electrifying commitment.  You can’t help but grin. And in the middle of all that chaos stands Micaela Diamond’s superbly crafted Sabina, breaking the fourth wall by yelling exactly what we’re all thinking: “Added songs! ‘Cause that’s what it’s missing!” But she says it with such sarcastic brilliance that the line becomes the show’s thesis. A joyful acknowledgment that adapting Wilder’s triptych of Ice Age–Flood–War absurdity into a musical might just be the best, most brilliant worst idea around, and, in Lipton and Silverman’s hands, it emerges as a thrillingly entertaining one.

Ethan Lipton’s adaptation is equal parts homage, parody, and sincere excavation that manages what I honestly thought was impossible when I reviewed LCT’s 2022 revival of the straight Wilder play. It makes The Skin of Our Teeth feel digestible. Even lovable, if I may be so brave, because in that earlier review, I wrote that the play “starts to feel more and more remote, as if we are the ones looking to escape with just that,” as Wilder’s metaphors piled higher than the snow in Act I. It was intellectually intriguing but emotionally aloof and overwhelmingly abstract. What The Seat of Our Pants accomplishes, remarkably, is excavation through humor, by untangling Wilder’s biblical imagery, scientific speculation, and apocalyptic symbolism. It revels in their chaos and absurdity by not solely clarifying them or unravelling the play’s riddles. It sings through them most deliberately and delightfully. And in doing so, where previously there was mostly a dazzlingly designed history lesson, the whole team finds its complete beating and entertaining heart.

That looseness and its willingness to acknowledge the play’s impossibility gifts director Silverman with a playground of tonal dynamite to musically ignite. She keeps the ridiculous journey sharp and surprisingly coherent, even when the plot hurtles from an Ice Age domestic comedy to a boardwalk carnival on the brink of the Flood to a post-war rubble-filled family reckoning. The staging is agile and witty, supported by Sunny Min-Sook Hitt’s frothy, character-specific choreography and by Daniel Kluger’s playful orchestrations (with co-music supervision by Kluger and Nathan Koci), which thread the show’s fractured logic together through rhythm rather than reason. The result is a musical that somehow feels both totally faithful and hilariously subversive.

The cast, uniformly excellent, brings the Antrobus saga, and all its prehistoric, mythic, and modern baggage, fully to luscious life. Shuler Hensley (NYCC’s Assassins) anchors the evening as Mr. Antrobus, imbuing the eternal patriarch with gravitas, bafflement, and a voice that rumbles like tectonic plates shifting. The always wonderful Ruthie Ann Miles (Broadway Center Stage’s Chess) is completely luminous as Mrs. Antrobus, grounding even the most outlandish sequences with emotional clarity. Damon Daunno (Broadway’s Oklahoma!), as Henry, begins in explosive volatility. He borders on something too much, but fortunately, finds his stride with each passing moment. Amina Faye (Public’s Suffs) as daughter Gladys is a bright, compelling force tethered to the family’s shifting moral center while desperately seeking paternal validation. A fascinating contrast to Daunno’s Henry and his relationship with his father. Andy Grotelueschen (Broadway’s Tootsie), Ally Bonino (Broadway’s Suffs), and Michael Lepore (Broadway’s Sing Street) deliver uproarious character turns, each carving out comic specificity in a show brimming with it. And then there’s Diamond (Broadway’s Parade), whose Sabina, equal parts trickster, truth-teller, and musical-theatre anarchist, gives the production its internal swagger and external charm, unleashing commentary that both astounds and elevates the show.

The world of The Seat is an absurdist feast, thanks to the shape-shifting scenic design by Lee Jellinek (Broadway’s Sea Wall/A Life), which manages to reference both Wilder’s original epic stage demands and the Public’s more elastic, playful sensibility. I’m not convinced the two-sided staging helps; the back-and-forth recentering feels forced rather than organic, but the costumes designed by Kaye Voyce (ATC’s The Welkin), moving from prehistoric furs to Atlantic City flair to post-war grit with clever specificity, work their magic on us completely. Lap Chi Chu’s lighting design navigates apocalyptic shifts with precision and humor, and the sound design by Drew Levy (Broadway’s A Strange Loop) keeps the chaos crisp, making sure the jokes land, the music resonates, and those pesky dinosaurs have a strong indoor presence.

What makes this musical unexpectedly moving is that it doesn’t run or hide from Wilder’s big, monolithic ideas. It just refuses to present them with pomposity. The Antrobus family still survives ice, flood, war, destruction, and their own dysfunction, while forever insisting on getting back to work and trying again. Lipton and Silverman honor that repetition not as a philosophical burden but as something human, funny, and oddly comforting. When the Antrobuses emerge from their own rubble in Act III, the show’s humor suddenly gains weight. All the nonsense, all the jokes, all the breaking of theatrical rules circles back to Wilder’s wacky worldview, insisting that survival is messy, cyclical, and rarely inspirational, yet stubbornly infused with hope.

I may still not know exactly what Wilder meant with every metaphor and symbol pushed up from the ground by ice, water, and war, but after delighting in this musical, I’m fairly convinced that clarity was never the point. The Seat of Our Pants embraces that uncertainty with exuberance. I’ll admit the play left me confused, fascinated, and emotionally distant. This musical version delivers something quite exhilarating and moving, filling me with a deep appreciation of the chaos and its containment. Lipton, Silverman, and their extraordinary cast haven’t simply added songs to Wilder’s strange epic; they’ve added heart, humor, and a theatrical wink that makes the impossible feel joyous.

And honestly, when a show announces itself with “Added songs! ’Cause that’s what it’s missing!” and then proceeds to prove, against all reason, that it might have actually been correct, that’s a miracle worth celebrating. Especially these days.