Thornton Wilder's satirical Pulitzer Prize-winning play "The Skin of Our Teeth," which opens April 27 at Cornell's Schwartz Center for the Arts, is ostensibly about a typical American family in classic 1950s suburbia. But it also dumps the family into the Ice Age, where commuting hassles include mammoths, dinosaurs and glaciers.

Director Kent Stephens promises a spectacle that takes the audience through three American epochs. For example, the patriarch of the family, George Antrobus, invents the wheel, the alphabet and beer, while his wife, Maggie, invents deep frying and the apron. Flash forward several eons and Antrobuses can be found in a melding of biblical Sodom and an Atlantic City political convention, circa 1976. The final act projects the family into a post-apocalyptic scenario in which they return to the problems of rebuilding the human race.

Wilder seduces with screwball theatricality while presenting disturbing vignettes of the human struggle. By situating monumental events in squabbling family relationships, Wilder's surreal circus celebrates the potential and danger lurking within the human species.

Stephens insists "Teeth," written in 1942, is a prescient "zeitgeist play," suggesting we are acutely aware of our fragility as a country and as a species.

"We're at our best in crisis," smiles Stephens, because it makes us "generous, resourceful and inventive." For him, Wilder's play illustrates a human struggle in which anything can happen, and disaster is just around the corner. Yet despite catastrophe and mistakes, through stupidity and fortitude, we pick up and start again.

Evening performances are slated for April 27-29 and May 4-6 at 8 p.m. Matinee May 6 is at 2 p.m. Tickets: students and seniors, $8; $10 general admission. For more information, call (607) 254-ARTS.

Paul Hansom is a freelance writer.