“What do we carry? What do we inherit?”
On one of the first hot, humid nights this spring, I entered the packed Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research’s intimate loft space on Huron Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn for a preview of the revival of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s three-act play, You Can’t Take It With You directed by Katie Devin Orenstein.
Together with Emma Hart, who plays Essie, the two are bringing “You Can’t Take It With You” back to the stage with a production that feels both respectful of its source material and refreshed for a new audience. Emma Hart, one of three producers of the play, happens to be the granddaughter of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Moss Hart. She and Orenstein met through a series of fortuitous chance encounters, and a creative partnership quickly bloomed. “I graduated undergrad in 2023 and kept bumping into her,” Orenstein recalls, “Back in November, I was in a pinch and needed an actor fast. Emma stepped in and saved the day, and she was brilliant. Around that time, she mentioned this project and asked if I had anything lined up. As soon as she told me about it, I said yes. It wasn’t just ‘Hey, want to direct a play?’—it was more like, ‘Here’s something sacred to my family. Will you help bring it to life?’ It felt like being invited to a Passover seder. A huge honor. My task was to live up to that.” Hart comes from a long lineage of artists involved in theatre. Her father, Christopher Hart, has been intimately involved in the Broadway revivals of Kaufman and Hart’s work, and through her family, Essie grew up immersed in the New York theater world. On many levels, the restaging of this play is an intergenerational reckoning.
Inside BTCR there was the air of an early summer party: the door to the fire escape was open to let in the breeze, and a makeshift bar sold Modelos and seltzer. I had attended Matthew Gasda’s production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in January and now, last winter’s Russian dacha was transformed into a haphazard, idiosyncratically decorated 1930s Upper West Side apartment: A small bugle horn pinned to a wall, lace doilies on the furniture, a mask of Karl Marx, a vase with live goldfish swimming. Otherwise, the production design was stripped back. There is a refreshing informality at this venue, in part necessitated by the space itself. You have to walk through a kitchen to get to your seat, and there are no curtains separating the stage from the house: I was able to watch as a trio of actors—Emma Hart, Tomias Robinson, and Jakov Schwartzberg—warmed up in front of us, clustered around the piano singing. On the choice of venue, Emma Hart says, “We chose BCTR partly because the space already felt like a living room—it’s what the play needs. We didn’t have to build a whole set. And it adds a homey, welcoming atmosphere.”
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Set during the Depression, in 1936, “You Can’t Take It With You” largely follows the eccentric Sycamore family, led by the benign, lovable patriarch, “Grandpa,” played by Tony Triano. His daughter, Penny Sycamore (played by Catherine Lloyd Burns), is a playwright and mother to Essie and Alice. Essie is an aspiring, hopelessly naive ballerina. Alice, the younger daughter and the most “grounded” so to speak of the family, is a sort of Jane Bennett in the Sycamore clan. At the start of the play, she has found a promising new beau, Tony Kirby the boss’ son, at her office. The play roughly follows the arc of their courtship, and the central conflict is the classic dynamic of star-crossed lovers: Alice and Tony’s families could not be more different. Tony’s parents, portrayed by Steve Schroko and Colleen Werthmann, are nearly caricatures of the patrician upper class–stodgy and uptight, with traditional values. Alice, though she loves her family, fears that her and Tony’s love is doomed due to the foundational incompatibility of their families. She delays their families’ meeting for as long as she can, but when they eventually do meet, everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. A comedy of errors ensues, culminating in a raid on the apartment by the FBI. Despite Alice’s best efforts, the Sycamore family’s eccentricity is put on full display, and there’s no going back. The play’s central questions emerge: Will Alice and Tony’s romance survive the gulf of difference that separates their families? And who will Alice choose, her family, or Tony?
More than just differing lifestyles, Alice and Tony’s families represent two drastically opposed attitudes towards money, and, in particular, a person’s relationship to making money. Grandpa, we learn, has largely opted out of the capitalist grind. His primary occupations are taking care of his snakes and attending commencement ceremonies. Tony’s father, Mr. Kirby, on the other hand, is a poster child of the successful capitalist, and he wants his son to follow the same path. On paper, Mr. Kirby seems successful and fulfilled, but when probed by Grandpa and others, cracks beneath the surface are quickly revealed. Grandpa, while not a productive member of society by any stretch of the imagination (for one thing, he hasn’t paid any income tax, his entire life), claims to be at peace and happy, and by the end of the play, we are inclined to believe him.
In offering these two opposed points of view, the play explores how class impacts our romantic relationships. This topic is especially relevant today, at a moment when so much media displays a preoccupation with money and how it impacts relationships (A few examples that come to mind: Emma Cline’s novel The Guest, the television series “White Lotus,” and articles like this one in The Cut.) By exploring the different ways that class intersects with romance with such candor and humor, the play feels both ahead of its time and utterly contemporary.
The play’s contemporary is spark is no doubt a result in part of the edits Orenstein has made to the original script. Consulting a 1964 published edition of the script, I was surprised to find that Orenstein’s production is remarkably faithful; it surprised me how many of the lines remained unchanged. The script has received some necessary updates. Some of the more painfully dated lines, particularly certain stereotypical bits of dialogue and casual racism of the period, have been, understandably, removed: “There were moments,” Orenstein says, “especially around race, where I had to think hard about what would land with a modern audience. Our job was to keep the original intent while making it resonant now.”
Part of the reason the play feels so current is that we are, whether we are conscious or not, living in an artistic and entertainment landscape fundamentally shaped by Hart and Kaufmann’s work. It’s no exaggeration to say that “You Can’t Take It With You” is a blueprint to the modern sitcom. This lineage was on the mind of Orenstein: “Kaufman and Hart were masters of structure, setting off chain reactions that build comedy. My points of reference are shows like 30 Rock, Frasier, Nora Ephron films, Rob Reiner, even Key & Peele,” Orenstein says, “All of that owes a debt to Kaufman and Hart. Their style is the original sitcom formula—one set, one room.” With this in mind, it’s easy now for me to see all the subsequent shows and films that owe an obvious debt to Hart and Kaufmann. Wes Anderson’s films, “The Royal Tenenbaums” especially, in their twee eccentricity and Rube Goldberg-esque physical comedy, come to mind.
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In one reading, combined with a foray into Moss Hart’s own background, the play emerges as a kind of idealized fantasy version of the family Hart wished he had growing up–artistic, eccentric, bohemian–rather than the destitute working-class background Hart emerged from. Born to immigrant Jewish parents at the turn of the century, Moss Hart had a difficult childhood. He grew up, as he recounts in his memoir, Act One, “in an atmosphere of unrelieved poverty.” Reading Moss Hart’s memoir, it is hard not to see Grandpa Sycamore as a kind of inverse of Hart’s actual grandfather, whose presence, according to Hart, was domineering: “My grandfather, whom I adored,” Moss Hart writes, “towered over my first seven years like an Everest of Victorian tyranny.” Describing her grandfather’s childhood, Emma Hart says: “He came from extreme poverty and made it big in a way that I think is nearly impossible now. That kind of poverty stayed with him. Even after he was successful, he struggled with feeling like he didn’t belong.” Theatre was an early form of escape for Hart. He writes, “I have a pet theory of my own, probably invalid, that the theatre is an inevitable refuge of the unhappy child.” But to say this play is simply a kind of wish-fulfillment would be to fail to do it justice, as both a comedy, and a work that asks thoughtful, philosophical questions.
What do we carry with us? What do we leave behind? These are some of the questions “You Can’t Take It With You” asks, and these questions were on the mind of Emma Hart. As she eloquently puts it: “ What do we inherit—biologically, spiritually, psychically? And what’s possible to leave behind?” The play is existential in that it asks fundamental questions about how we should live our lives, but it’s existentialism that is accessible. This is still a comedy, after all.
As Orenstein puts it: “Every classic was once radical,” and this play, in its own unassuming, tongue-in-cheek way, is indeed quietly radical, even if it might not appear so at first glance. Perhaps the most radical and resonant aspect of the play is its depiction of someone who has left the rat race and has managed to carve out a life and find fulfillment and community outside of it, with his snakes and his family and his commencement ceremonies.
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