" The Skin of Our Teeth mostly comes alive under conditions of crisis, " said playwright Thornton Wilder of his 1942 Pulitzer winner, in which the Family of Man, transplanted to the New Jersey suburbs, narrowly dodges the bullet of extinction three times. How fitting, then, that Trinity Rep opened its whimsical yet gritty revival of the play on September 11. A commemorative rally was tangling Providence traffic as, within the theater, Wilder’s wacky, cataclysmic paean to human ingenuity and innate worth trampled its way from the Ice Age to the Flood to the horrors of marital philandering and modern warfare.

Of course, apt or not, The Skin of Our Teeth remains as curious as the Antrobuses’ family pets — a benign dinosaur and woolly mammoth. The play, whose Antrobus clan is an Ozzie-and-Harriet riff on Mankind through the Ages, combines what was for its time striking non-naturalism with optimistic, old-fashioned American-family values. Some of these, particularly as relate to gender and intellect, now lash the work to Mrs. Antrobus’s proudly brandished apron. Despite the play’s third-act call for a new woman who is " a combination of a saint and a college professor and a dancehall hostess, " the ones we get are Mrs. Antrobus, the maternal philistine who would " burn ten Shakespeares to prevent a child of mine from having one cold in the head, " and Sabina, the vampy maid who keeps jumping the ship of the play to tell the audience she doesn’t understand a word of it. Mr. Antrobus, on the other hand, doesn’t consider it a day at the office unless he’s invented both the alphabet and the wheel.

But you have to give Wilder’s unwieldy allegory credit. Although the play is more important than good, the ahead-of-its-time fourth-wall bashing had members of the Trinity audience certain the work had been doctored when, despite an apocalyptic bare-bones design, the production is for the most part faithful to Wilder’s words and time. Even the grainy, grayish newsreel footage created for the staging (replete with shots of Sabina water-skiing at Atlantic City) has a period feel. Director Amanda Dehnert understands that, for all of its own wanderings through history and myth, the play, with its militant hearth warming and central Biff-and-Willy conflict, is as anchored to the 1940s as it is to the Bible and Finnegans Wake.

Whatever Wilder was snorting through his Our Town soda straw when he came up with The Skin of Our Teeth, it’s a difficult work to pull off. The Trinity Rep staging comes close (though I would cut more of the third act, in which a projected end of World War II devolves into a Freudian struggle between Antrobus and Henry that’s part Adam–Cain, part Allies–Axis). Dehnert, working with her frequent collaborator, set designer David Jenkins, starts out not with a picket-fenced oasis but with a looming, minimally furnished plywood bunker from which, by the third act, every comfort (including the ground) seems to have fallen away. Moreover, she treats the arguably loopy work with deadly seriousness. The despair threatening to engulf the Antrobuses seems as urgent a threat as act one’s glacier thundering down from Vermont or the Noah-esque storm that threatens the partying homo sapiens conventioneers of act two. And though the pet mammoth, fur-coated like a little Bette Davis, with tusks like vaudeville canes, is cute, the Antrobuses’ wayward son Henry, when he enters after killing a neighbor boy with a stone, is up to his elbows in clotted blood.

The performances, too, are deeply invested, with the caprice of civilization’s refugees singing camp songs to avert the Ice Age muted. (Even damped down, Brian McEleney’s droning Homer and drunken Shriner are hilarious.) A bearded William Damkoehler combines Biblical authority and goofy enthusiasm as Mr. Antrobus, who holds onto hope with white knuckles. Phyllis Kay is a breezy yet pained Mrs. Antrobus, doing her best to cram Mother Courage into Donna Reed. Stephen Thorne captures the woundedness of the screaming-for-Ritalin Henry and Nehassaiu deGannes the desperation of Antrobus daughter Gladys’s attempts to save the family through vice and perfection. The showboating part, of course, is Sabina, and Rachael Warren’s domestic temptress (in Wizard of Oz slippers and a jumpsuit) is a winner, conveying both the gutsy exasperation of the actress in over her head and the deeper pluck of the play’s ragged, ravaged survivor. Perhaps it was Sabina whom Stephen Sondheim had in mind when he declared, in a less lofty bowdlerization of history, that " Everybody Ought To Have a Maid. "