Off-Broadway's Public Adds Skin of Our Teeth Musical to 2025 Slate
Next fall, The Public’s Emerging Writers Group alumnus and Obie Award-winning playwright, songwriter, and singer Ethan Lipton brings his irreverently funny show THE SEAT OF OUR PANTS to The Public for its world premiere. A rollicking musical adaptation of Thorton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, this new musical about age-old problems tells the twisting, often absurd story of the Antrobus family who have been alive for 5,000 years but live in the same existential dread as the rest of us. Mired in the hot mess of being alive, the Antrobuses survive all manner of catastrophe in their endless quest to begin again, and again, and again. Two-time Tony Award nominee Leigh Silverman directs this bracingly original spectacle—a musical reminder that surviving is what we do best.
“The Skin of Our Teeth is a beautiful play,” shares adapter Ethan Lipton about his inspiration for THE SEAT OF OUR PANTS. “A comedy about a family in a world of never-ending existential crises, Wilder’s script is prescient and heartbreaking and totally bonkers. I’m thrilled to have been given the chance to turn the show into a musical—at The Public, no less, and with the great Leigh Silverman—and I can’t wait to share it with our own totally screwed-up world.”
Tappen Wilder, spokesperson for The Wilder family, shares similar excitement about the collaboration. “The Skin of Our Teeth blew the roof off Broadway in 1942, hurling it through time and space. After a long search for a music-maker for Skin, the stars aligned and led us to Ethan Lipton. ‘Sensibility’ is a difficult word to define, but not where the crazy and timeless genius of the play, Lipton, and Silverman’s talents are concerned.”
THE SEAT OF OUR PANTS BIOS:
ETHAN LIPTON (Music and Lyrics)’s plays include Tumacho and Luther (Clubbed Thumb), and Red-Handed Otter (Playwrights Realm). Musicals include No Place to Go and The Outer Space (produced by The Public in Joe’s Pub; tours produced by Arktype), and We are Your Robots (premiering fall 2024 in a co-production from TFANA and Rattlestick). Winner of the Kleban Prize and an Obie award, Lipton has been a Creative Capital Grantee, a Guggenheim fellow, a Page One fellow, and an inaugural member of The Public’s Emerging Writers Group. The Seat of our Pants will be his fifth theatrical collaboration with director Leigh Silverman. As frontman for the quartet Ethan Lipton & his Orchestra, Lipton has played SF Jazz, Celebrate Brooklyn, MASS MoCa, Pitchfork Paris, ATP, Theatre de la Ville, the Gate (London), a 50th birthday party where no one could hear anything, and most recently at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. www.ethanlipton.com
LEIGH SILVERMAN (Director). Two-time Tony nominated. With Ethan Lipton at The Public: No Place to Go and The Outer Space (also with Clubbed Thumb); Tumacho. Broadway: Yellow Face (Roundabout); Suffs (Tony nom); Grand Horizons; The Lifespan of a Fact; Violet (Tony nom); Chinglish; Well. Recent: Harry Clarke (West End, BRT,Vineyard/Audible); Suffs (The Public); Merry Me (NYTW); The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (Shed, CTG); Soft Power (CTG/Curran, The Public); Hurricane Diane (NYTW). Other world premieres at The Public include: Well, Yellow Face, and Wild Goose Dreams. Encores: Violet; The Wild Party. Audible: Yellow Face; Harry Clarke; Dykes to Watch Out For. 2011 Obie Award; 2019 Obie for Sustained Excellence.