You Can't Take It With You
November 15 - December 23, 2007
Rubicon Theatre Company
Ventura, California

Winner of three Independent Theatre Awards including the award for outstanding achievement in directing presented to Jenny Sullivan!

Rubicon Theatre Company presents George Kaufman and Moss Hart's 1937 Pulitzer Prize-Winning You Can't Take It With You

You Can't Take It With You is a screwball comedy - a genre more often associated with film than stage plays.  Screwball comedy features farcical situations, a combination of slapstick and fast-paced repartee, and a plot involving courtship and marriage.  One critic labeled screwball comedy as "a sex comedy without the sex."  Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing is screwball comedy; so, too, are As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream.  Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest falls into the category.

The truest practitioners of screwball comedy on the American stage were Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman.  Hart was the word man, the style man, the younger man.  Kaufman was the stage man - the tough old trouper with practical knowledge of the theatre.  Despite his claim that he knew nothing about music and hated it in the theatre, Kaufman collaborated on many musical theatre projects.  Of Thee I Sing, co-authored by Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind in 1931, was the first musical ever to receive a Pulitzer Prize.

You Can't Take It With You took the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1937.  It is a deceptively simple piece that satirizes everything from income tax to capitalism to racism.  The unseen character in the play is The Great Depression with its great divide between haves and have-nots.  The Kirbys raise orchids at ten thousand dollars a pop.  The Vanderhof/Sycamore clan subsist on cornflakes, watermelon and "some kind of meat" while going their merry ways.

The polite, unspoken question at the heart of the play is, "At what stage are the necessities of life adequately provided for?"  One answer lies in the nature of capitalism which can never have enough, must always be gaining more.  Another idea is folk-based, emphasizing the values of community, sharing and respect.  The true American, by this perspective, belongs to a simpler world more in conformity with nature than the urban industrial world.  The poet, Carl Sandberg, felt this force emerging across America in 1936.  He wrote of the value of individual thought - the search for that which is most important for each of us.  Things you can take with you.

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