NEW YORK, NY.- I was 15 when I appeared in a camp production of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth” — I mean “camp” in the sense of a summer sleep-away experience, though the other meaning may apply, too. What, after all, were a bunch of naive teenagers doing in this surreal, existential tragicomedy by the author of “Our Town,” with its mash-up of biblical revisionism, theatrical satire and apocalyptic escapades?

We were reviving it, I guess; “The Skin of Our Teeth” had premiered more than 30 years earlier, in 1942. Still, if our summer production marked a low point in its history, that history did not end with us; as Wilder dramatizes so effectively in the saga of the Antrobus family persisting through eons, the world keeps revolving and its central stories return.

So, this spring, will “The Skin of Our Teeth” — and it won’t be alone. Broadway will also offer revivals of four other plays, each from a different decade: “Plaza Suite” from the ’60s, “American Buffalo” from the ’70s, “How I Learned to Drive” from the ’90s and “Take Me Out” from the aughts. Of course, revivals are always a part of the Broadway mix but, taken together, this year’s constitute an especially vivid time capsule of our theater over the past 80 years. They offer a glimpse at the world into which they first emerged, and also a glimpse at ours.

That double vision will be explicit in “The Skin of Our Teeth,” a Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. Connecting its theme of survival despite near-extinction to the Black experience, Blain-Cruz has assembled a cast — including James Vincent Meredith, Roslyn Ruff, Gabby Beans and Priscilla Lopez — that “embodies the complexity that is America,” she says.

The play welcomes and models that complexity: Written during World War II, it reflects calamity in both story and style. Time collapses; though they live in 20th-century New Jersey, the Antrobuses are threatened by war, a flood and a Pleistocene ice sheet. Among the roles are the poet Homer, a mastodon, the biblical Cain — and the actress playing the maid, who keeps breaking character.

With the major exception of Edward Albee, Broadway dramatists did not much take up Wilder’s surrealistic thread in the next few decades. The ’50s were dominated by “problem plays,” generally naturalistic and narrowly pointed. (A very fine one, “Trouble in Mind,” from 1955, was revived earlier this season.) The ’60s brought us, among other trends, the middle-class urban comedy of which Neil Simon was the leading proponent.

If his earlier shows of that era — including “The Odd Couple,” “Barefoot in the Park” and the musical “Sweet Charity” — deal in one way or another with the foreshocks of women’s liberation and sexual revolution, surely the most Simony of Simon’s ’60s hits is “Plaza Suite.” By 1968, when it opened, the earthquake was in full tremor.

As if to acknowledge the size of the change, Simon wrote what are basically three unrelated one-act plays about marriage, connected only by their setting — room 719 of the title hotel — and the stars who take the leads in each. In this season’s revival, directed by John Benjamin Hickey, Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker play, in turn, a couple attempting a second honeymoon, a movie producer wooing a now-married ex and, in the farce finale, the parents of a bride who has locked herself in the bathroom.

Though “Plaza Suite” is a play about sour relationships between men and women, it could still, in the ’60s, be a comedy. Just seven years later, and yet an epoch, David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” demonstrated that comedy was at best a sugarcoating on tragedy. In this it was strongly influenced by a new breed of movies, including “Mean Streets,” “Chinatown” and “The Godfather,” that in the early ’70s had come to dominate cultural expression with their focus on criminal psychopathology.




For “American Buffalo,” which opened on Broadway in 1977, Mamet devised a theatrical equivalent to the harshly evocative visuals of those films. It’s the language of dominance that gives depth to his characters: a junk shop owner, his poker buddy and a dim assistant. (In this season’s revival, directed by Neil Pepe, they are played by Laurence Fishburne, Sam Rockwell and Darren Criss.) As the three plan to rob a customer of a valuable coin, Mamet endows their pettiness with an almost Shakespearean grandeur, deploying a vulgar vernacular that sounds like blank verse after a year in the sewer.

For all its linguistic invention, there’s nothing formally unconventional about “American Buffalo”; in fact, it’s almost classical. Nor is the topic new. But in the next decades, thanks in part to the continued progress of feminism and liberation, playwrights were able to put formerly taboo subjects center stage without having to sensationalize them. At the same time, the naturalism that had dominated mainstream American theater since the ’50s began to loosen its grip.

“How I Learned to Drive,” by Paula Vogel, exemplifies both parts of that change. Its subject is the sexual molestation, starting at age 11, of a girl called Li’l Bit by her Uncle Peck. From there the play reaches out in many unexpected directions, including Li’l Bit’s ambivalence about (and her family’s complicity in) the abuse. These remain shocking today.

But it is also narratively inventive, drawing on elements of all the theatrical movements that came before it. Explicitly acknowledging its own form, as “The Skin of Our Teeth” did, it is narrated by Li’l Bit as a memory, yet the sequence is nonchronological; a Greek chorus comments on the action and plays the secondary roles. The connections among scenes are the kind you find not in neat outlines but in dreams.

One result of that ethereal quality is that “How I Learned to Drive” resists conclusions, leaving it open to reinvention. You can imagine the roles being played by anyone, regardless even of age — and indeed, this spring’s production reassembles the director (Mark Brokaw) and stars (Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse) of the play’s 1997 premiere. How will a story about the meaning of maturity change now that its leading actors are 25 years older?

“How I Learned to Drive” is the only one of this season’s revivals that has not previously appeared on Broadway. (It originally played off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theater.) Yet it’s undoubtedly a classic; a commercial production will not be the test of its longevity. But for newer works, like Richard Greenberg’s 2002 “Take Me Out,” a first Broadway revival is in part a chance to see if there is likely to be a second.

As a matter of mere relevance, the play is still timelier than one might like. It concerns the effects on a baseball team very much like the New York Yankees after its star player, named Darren Lemming, comes out as gay. Note that it wasn’t until September that Bryan Ruby became the first active professional baseball player to do this in real life.

But unlike gay plays of an earlier vintage, “Take Me Out” is not concerned with earning sympathy. Its real interest is in sport itself: how it conducts itself and how it inspires others. The locker-room drama (one teammate is a vicious homophobe) is balanced by the drama of intense fandom, as Lemming’s nebbishy gay accountant, Mason Marzac, becomes obsessed with the game.

I’m eager to see whether the Second Stage Theater production — directed by Scott Ellis and starring Jesse Williams as Lemming and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Marzac — puts “Take Me Out” onto a new footing. To last like “The Skin of Our Teeth,” identity-based plays have to prove they have something to say once the identity issues are moot.

Case in point: Few of us have a stake anymore in the succession struggles of 11th-century Scotland, yet we still line up to see a 500-year-old play about them. Indeed, “Macbeth” — starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga — is also being revived this spring.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.