Note:  for an interesting take on this play, read Mark Lowry's blog about his first encounter with it.  Click here.

A wife who looks after the home. A husband who is an inventor. Two growing children. A knowing and unreliable maid, and two pets. The Antrobuses are the classic American family. Well, except that the pets are dinosaurs, and the father is inventing the wheel and multiplication, and all are in danger from an onrushing Ice Age. And that’s the way things are, in Thornton Wilder’s remarkable take on history and the American family. 

George and Maggie Antrobus are clearly Adam and Eve, but their Garden of Eden is now the Garden State, New Jersey. And even though they face extinction from the aforementioned Ice Age, and later from a flood and a major war, their struggles are the same as ours—trying to survive crisis after crisis, and keep their family safe and together.

Writing about a recent production for Twin Cities Daily Planet, Matthew A. Everett said “The fact that the war could be any war, that the flood reminded me of Hurricane Katrina as much as Noah’s Ark, and that the Ice Age brought to my mind the flipside of the fires of global warming, all without changing so much as a word of the text, says a lot about Wilder’s genius. The fact that the end of the human race works as a comedy says still more about the writer.”