"The Skin of Our Teeth," winner of the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for drama, will open the 1999-2000 Performing Arts at Colby season. Thornton Wilder's three-act play will be performed in Colby's Strider Theater October 14-16 at 8 p.m nightly. General admission is $3, students and seniors are $2. For ticket information call the box office at 872-3358 between 4-6 p.m. Monday through Wednesday of performance week or 872-3388 at all other times. Or reserve tickets online at www.colby.edu/perf.arts.

"The play is a wonderful mix of the wildly theatrical and the truly touching," said director Joylynn Wing, associate professor of performing arts. "Wilder is truly an American classic whose witty optimism provides a timely relief from the millennium doomsayers."

Wing directs a cast of 14 including leads Emily Bridwell '02 of Brookside, N.J., Kristin Elder '02 of Scituate, Mass., Liz Frankel '01 of Essex, Conn., Gib Gerard '03 of Los Angeles, Calif., and Jory Raphael '02 of Panton, Vt.

"The Skin of Our Teeth," is the satiric story of the extraordinary adventures of the Antrobus family down through the ages. Wilder traces the Antrobus family from the ice age through nuclear holocaust with the help of woolly mammoths and mystical muses. Ultimately bewitched, befuddled and becalmed, they are the stuff of which heroes are made heroes and buffoons. They have survived a thousand calamities by the skin of their teeth, and the play is a tribute to their indestructibility and a testament of faith in humanity.