It's a shame The Skin of Our Teeth will always be thought of as the Thornton Wilder play that isn't Our Town. It's better written and more adventurous, packed with groping, leering humanity. It's also a hair-pulling bitch to explain. The first act is set simultaneously in the suburbs and on a primeval savanna verging on an ice age, the second act takes place in Atlantic City before the biblical flood, and the third act is a problem we'll get to later. Wilder does a fantastic job of piercing little holes in the institutions he's acclaimed for reinforcing: family and theater. A father groans that "a man can stand a family only so long," and a maid sneers that "I hate this play and every single word in it," and the bile is joyous.

Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus (Howie Seago and Anne Scurria) are Adam and Eve; they're worried that their son Henry (J. D. Tracy), formerly known as Cain, will kill someone. Mr. Antrobus makes a barn burner of a speech (deaf actor Seago's signing is translated by many of the ensemble, giving him a multitude of "voices") when he's elected president of humanity, announcing that the new watchwords for the human race are: "enjoy yourselves." Cue the good-time girls; cue the flood.

It's a gorgeous show. The set transforms from a house to a boardwalk that functions as an ark, and there's an eye-poppingly wondrous baby woolly mammoth (Ernest L. Pumphrey Jr. and Derek Schreck). The first two acts are packed with anachronisms and fourth-wall violations, but the third act, played on a barren stage, becomes dour. After "the war," the Antrobus family lives like rats in a postapocalyptic world without much in the way of hope.

Humor and surrealism are forgotten—it's as if Our Town poked its damned head through the floorboards and forced this play into an artificially lofty, humanist conclusion, in the form of an extended monologue about books and philosophers being the pride of the human race. Mr. Antrobus has seen dozens of wars and philosophers come and go in his immortal life, so his hopeful, "this-time-it'll-be-different" chin-chuck rings false, though it's given all the gravitas of a sermon. The joy of this script is in the pointless merry-go-round of human history, not the nobility of the poor schmucks who are stuck on the ride.