You Can’t’ Take it Without You
The play ‘You Can’t Take it Without You’ by Kauffman and Hart is a Pulitzer Prize winning play. Originally fashioned in the year 1936, while the Great Depression was still in its fullest swing, this play is about a family that is supported by passive earnings, whose primary life objective was to just carry on with life while being happy in the best way possible.
Martin Vanderhof, Grandpa, role played by James Earl Jones, quits his job in 1901 and makes up his mind to relax and wait for life to meet him. When this play was first played, as the Depression continued, the idea that anybody could relax and allows the happy days amuse them was actually a wild idea. It was not just Grandpa who took this stance, but it was his whole family that joined him in this entertaining pursuit, including his daughter, his son-in-law, as well as their children who were married. One would never be aware that The Great Depression was just beyond the doors of this particular family.
This play of Kauffman and Hart, stresses more upon the visual element of the theater comprising a four-color interior, brushed up illustration setting, and an innovative photo essay, which records the progress and production of the play. This play is a typical American stage entertainment and humor, which skillfully unites various artistic elements like farce, pleasantry, creative humor, societal commentary, and romance, together with a liberal splash of good-natured sanguinity about the human civilization.
Many of the modern stage comedies are violently joke-based. To be precise, the focus on modern stage comedies is upon the fact that the audience twists to the rhythm of the playwright’s punch lines and showcase laughs on a prompt. It can be a satiating if seldom an amazing experience, like viewing sitcoms in the public. In either case, such type of comedies comprise of all but doused out the ancient, warmer kind that thrived on Broadway during the first half of the 20th century with at least a few obligatory points; few written prior to the year 1960 as it seems revivable, at least to the business-minded producers. It is thus not merely a treat to theatre-goers, but rather a lesson in comicality to look at a 76-year-old play like You Can’t Take It With You which continues to spring- off the page and tear through a wide set of audience. It may be a chestnut, but when staged and cast as smartly as this Broadway revival, a chestnut goes down like marron glacé.
Works Cited
Goldfarb, Edwin Wilson & Alvin. Theatre: The Lively Art / Edition 7. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2009.
You Can't Take it With You . By Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. Perf. Rachel Sheppard, Whitney Rydbeck Eileen T’Kaye. The Colony Theater Company. 1936.
