You can’t knock You Can’t Take it With You. The 1937 Pulitzer Prize winning play, which just enjoyed a production at the Brooklyn Centre for Theatre Research, remains popular among high schools for good reason: its extended cast of kooky characters, absurd politics, and parlor-room fun is as American and serviceable as apple pie. This domestic drama follows Grandpa Vanderhof’s tax evasion scheme and his granddaughter Alice’s attempt to introduce a fiancé to her family of eccentrics. And while not everything about the play has aged gracefully, this production featuring co-writer Moss Hart’s own granddaughter Emma Hart showed that You Can’t Take it With You hasn’t totally lost its edge.
What this production illustrated so well for me was the contemporaneity of Hart and George S. Kaufman’s Americana classic. Despite approaching its centennial, the play’s scenario translates beautifully to the 2020s: A beautiful, depressive woman named Alice falls for someone named Kirby, who we’d now call a nepo-baby working on Wall Street. Meanwhile, everyone dreams of “making it” in what’s basically a housing co-op of amateur artists and entrepreneurs, while a bumbling patriarch’s tax fraud finally catches up to him. If she were alive today, instead of selling candy, I like to imagine that Essie, eldest daughter and aspiring ballerina, would make a killing selling the family’s knickknacks on Etsy. Her husband Ed would keep himself busy making jungle beats on FL Studio for her to dance to, rather than devotedly hammering a xylophone. The family would expand their ill-informed, sentence-by-sentence analysis of Leon Trotsky—which leads to the entire family’s arrest at the end of Act 2—into a community reading group. By the final act, as Alice and Tony Kirby’s families finally see eye-to-eye, I was met with a delightful realization of how much hasn’t changed. All of this could take place in Brooklyn now!
The marriage plot of You Can’t Take it WIth You paves the way for modern classics like Meet the Fockers, The Family Stone, and The Addams Family Musical, though its drawn-out, three-act structure today feels sadly dated. So too do Grandfather Vanderhof’s staunch, libertarian refusal to pay his income taxes, the narrative sidelining of the family’s maid Rheba, and the play’s wacky handling of US-Russian relations.
These outmoded elements of the experience felt like opening up a time capsule where I was transported back to my high school’s production, sitting in uncomfortable metal chairs waiting for my favorite characters to reappear. The cramped set and setting certainly heightened the chaos of having upwards of a dozen characters duking it out at once, but the design presented more of a thrift store’s idea of an eclectic dining room than something period-authentic or truly zany. The audience’s proximity to the homely playing space didn’t lead to immersion, which felt like a missed opportunity. Being right there as Alice and Tony declared their love, I also wanted to play mother Penny’s word games, scarf down my own bowl of corn flakes (the family’s staple food), or be offered my own seat at the dinner table. The enthusiasm of the players made me want to be invited—like with the characters of Mr. De Pinna or the nameless milkman—into the family, where I could cultivate my own antisocial hobbies.
This production, however, seemed to remain faithful to how the play once was, and the maintenance of dramatic distance does enhance the feeling that this family lives in their own bubble. That being said, I could not detect a coherent directorial vision beyond getting through the lengthy script, despite the potential for so many bits of this play to be accommodated for today. Maybe we could have an immersive You Can’t Take it With You, maybe a campy, on-the-nose You Can’t Take it With You, maybe a hyper-realist You Can’t Take it With You, maybe a version that utilized the well-trod story to comment on found family, nepotism, or Red Scare propaganda. All of the compelling social threads of the story were left in the past, but further amplifying even just the delightful absurdity of the characters would lead to more riotous comedy. Grandpa’s delivery of the title-line could have been this production’s own “chicken jockey” moment (please see A Minecraft Movie), but his apolitical monologue explaining the moral of the play just comes and goes as something not worth further engaging with.
Amid the giant cast, some performances really stood out: from Will Bruno as the strict and fed-up ballet instructor Boris Kolenkhov, Jakov Schwartzberg as the doting Ed Carmichael, Sid Ross as the pyromaniac father Paul Sycamore, and Tony Triano as the evasive and easy-going Grandpa Vanderhof. Tomias Robinson brought a great, intense, and comedic energy as the family’s maid Rheba, which made me especially disappointed in the old script’s lack of attention to her romance with unemployed handyman Donald– they’re the most compelling couple! Perhaps this material is due for a rewrite à la Ronán Noone’s Thirst or Jean Genet’s The Maids.
You Can’t Take it With You is a play bursting with unrealized potential. What I took away from Grandpa Vanderhof is that his cheeky, disengaged lifestyle is neither good nor feasible, even if that kind of political refusal was salient a century ago.
Leave a Reply