The difficult aspect of the job of a playwright is that they must assume the audience is intelligent enough to understand the underlying aspects of the play. These are the specific implications that are brought on by the mentioning of other parts. Playwrights must balance a fine line between making a successful play that even the stupidest in the audience understand and a play where the audience is dumbfounded because the humor was just over their heads. Wilder walks this line in "The Skin of Our Teeth" by taking his audience through the journey of an assortment of times and settings to force us to discover that even through different circumstances, man still remains the same and truly does not learn from the mistakes learned from earlier humans. This satirical piece really focuses on the fact that there is no specific time and that the places are all representative allusions and implications to other times. The settings really just change at each act. The first act opens at the Antrobus' home, then in Atlantic City and finally returning to the changed Antrobus home. These simplest locations take on a whole new meaning when the audience realizes what they really represent.
             The audience is first introduced to the Antrobus's and their typical middle class American home in Excelsior, New Jersey. Wilder had a specific reason to pick those names for the setting because of the implications that they hold. First, New Jersey is used because it is the known as the garden state. Wilder wanted to continue the allusion to the biblical story of Adam and Eve and how they lived in the Garden of Eden. Next, Excelsior was chosen because of it's diction which means the highest point of something and since they were in the ice age this implies two things. First that they were going to be the highest part of the ice age and most likely survive the cold. Second the theme that humans are the most important and t...