Wilder Works And Time Theme Essays - Antrobus, The Skin Of Our Teeth

Wilder Works And Time Theme According to Hall the experience of time "varies in detail from class to class, by occupation, and sex and age within our own culture". (Hall, 1984: 133) Thus its perception is highly subjective. While some people may experience time as running very fast at the same time others can feel it drag. Time escapes definitions though the passage of time can be felt in human personal experience and observed in the environment. Strange as it as, people are aware of time at the same time not being able to say what it really is. St. Augustine is no exception when he once said: "What then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know." Time is of philosophical interest and is also the subject of mathematical and scientific investigation. Each group sees time different; that is why it cannot be given any simple and illuminating definition. Edward T. Hall in his The Dance of Life took a cultural approach. For Hall: "Time is treated as a language, as a primary organizer for all activities, a synthesizer and integrator, a way of handling priorities and categorizing experience, (...) and a special message system revealing how people really feel about each other and whether or not they can get along." (Hall, 1984, 3) In fact nothing occurs except in some kind of frame time as people feel, think, and act in the time flow. Wilder is most famous for his experiments with time. In most of his plays time is not presented linearly. It can have a spiral structure with many 'loops'; it can, as well, take many different dimensions at the same moment. Composing plays with universal dimension, Wilder does not use object but he asks the spectators to imagine things. He, also, resigns from decorations in favor of bare stage or does not give his actors real props. This all aims at gaining the universal dimension of the play, as objects are material and closed for broader meaning. To have a cosmological dimension, he uses imaginary as the most universal and atemporal 'tool' to create required illusion. Thus, in the plays, everything is highly symbolic and underwritten with the rule: "All, Everywhere, Always". Stage as a symbol of life and characters as representatives of humanity cannot have real objects. In this work, it proved impossible to concentrate only on two characters as it do not reveal all the mechanisms of perceiving time in the presented plays. To have the full image of the problem, it was essential to have at least a pair of each. These are: Emily Webb and George Gibbs (Our Town) and the Antrobus family (The Skin of Our Teeth). They are distinctive enough to prove a good example of multi-dimensional experience of time and all mechanisms that are working in it. The Skin of Our Teeth has a complex structure that is difficult to describe in a conventional way. That is why it will be summarized as it appears in the text and all necessary explanations will be provided throughout the work. The family consists of four members: Mr. & Mrs. Antrobus, two children, Gladys and Henry and Sabina - a maid. The first act opens with the Antrobus family's daily duties. These are just prosaic and trivial things. They have a meal together (with a dinosaur on their lawn); they meet a group of guests (for example: Homer, Moses and Muses) and they drink coffee (afraid of the incoming glacier). The next act takes place in Atlantic City where the family celebrates their 5th wedding anniversary. Sabina wants to seduce Mr. Antrobus and is stopped by the cataclysm - great flood. The last act is set after a global war. The family is restored again apart from Henry who proves to undergo a great negative change. Our Town is structurally less complicated. The story describes lives of two resembling each other families - the Gibbs and the Webbs. They are common people who are, also, preoccupied with such prosaic daily duties like bringing-up children, cooking three meals a day, doing homework, singing in church-choir or gossiping. The play is divided into three acts, too. The first act deals with childhood and adolescence of the two families' children. Act two presents wedding between George Gibbs and Emily Webb and the moment of their falling in love. The last one describes the funeral of Emily who died during her second childbirth