"You Can't Take It With You": Putting the "fun" in dysfunctional family

Zany mom. Wacky dad. Offbeat grandpa. And one normal daughter, trying to live like "regular people" despite the gang of oddballs that constitute her blood relations.

Sound familiar? It should, since we've seen some variation on this theme many a time in mainstream American entertainment.

Recent examples include the film "Little Miss Sunshine," about a quirky family road trip to a beauty contest for little girls, and the Emmy-winning TV sitcom "Arrested Development," centered on another bizarro U.S. clan.

There's also "August: Osage County," a Tony Award winner by Tracy Letts. Broadway's biggest hit play by an American writer in a good while, the painfully hilarious study of a nutty Oklahoma brood will come on tour to Seattle's Paramount Theatre in 2009.

This homegrown genre of zany family comedy goes way back, however. And one of its hardiest ancestors, the George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart 1936 comedy "You Can't Take It With You," is being dusted off and spiffed up for a run at Seattle Repertory Theatre, starting this week.

Comedic comfort food

In one sense, "You Can't Take It With You" is a fond theatrical relic that American regional theaters periodically and affectionately turn to — think of it as comedic comfort food. (The Rep last produced it in1986.)

It is a group portrait of the Sycamores, an extended family occupying a rambling house in New York City's Morningside Heights neighborhood. This is the Great Depression, so times are tough and money scarce.

But Grandpa Martin Vanderhof and kin are cheerful, colorful and proud nonconformists, who avidly and ineptly pursue sundry pastimes (ballet dancing, painting, novel writing) in a living room that often resembles a three-ring circus. The only threats to their childlike enjoyment of life are intrusions from killjoy members of the establishment — the FBI, the IRS and "normal" daughter Alice's pompous future in-laws.

The script is a road-tested vehicle for ensemble actors, and the Seattle Rep's new outing has an all-star local cast, including Elizabeth Huddle, R. Hamilton Wright and Michael Winters as the irascibly lovable (and fervent tax dodger) Grandpa. It's also a favorite American period piece for directors. Former Intiman Theatre artistic head Warner Shook, a whiz at this kind of vintage comedy and director of last season's "The Women" at ACT Theatre, does the honors in this production.

The affirming family farce

But taking a longer view, "You Can't Take It With You" is also a prototype for intergenerational farces that will get progressively darker and more focused on serious familial dysfunction by the decade. Representing a somewhat kinder, gentler era in our pop culture, the play reflects back to us an idealized image of the pixilated American family of one's dreams — eccentric, embarrassing, sure. But also merrily affirming, ultimately.

Both Kaufman and Hart hailed from unorthodox families that were (as actual families tend to be) less delightful than the Sycamores. But nonstandard childhoods helped mold the wits of these Broadway scribes, who were prolific masters of the zesty, sardonic East Coast-centric stage humor that paralleled the screwball movie romps of Preston Sturges and Frank Capra in the same period.

Hart and Kaufman's initial Broadway hit as a team was another prototypical comedy: "Once in a Lifetime," a spoof of the Hollywood movie industry's excesses and foibles. (For a recent play of that ilk, look to David Mamet's "Speed-the-Plow," now on Broadway in a revival starring Jeremy Piven, of TV's "Entourage.")

In 1936, after the prolific Kaufman had scored a string of other Broadway hits on his own or with different collaborators (including "Stage Door" and "Dinner at Eight"), he described the new script he and Hart were writing in a letter to his wife, Beatrice.

It was, he told her, about "a slightly mad family," in which the youngest daughter "is the only sane one. She falls in love with the son of a conventional family, and the play proper concerns her attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable elements."

Mad, not dangerous

"Slightly mad" are the operative words here. No one in "You Can't Take It With You" is presented as urgently in need of psychiatric care. And none is dangerous — if you don't count their more treacherous hobbies. (The grandpa collects snakes; a son-in-law cooks up homemade explosives in the basement.)

What the play mythologizes, in essence, is a rugged individualism Americans have long championed, recast as an entertaining and ultimately benign bundle of idiosyncrasies — a "benevolent mayhem," as Kaufman biographer Malcolm Goldstein put it.

Also celebrated is the notion of a family as a united band of tolerant individualists who welcome in new members of all races, nationalities and political bents (boarders, servants) but never descend into divisive chaos.

An American success story

When "You Can't Take It With You" made its triumphant Broadway debut at the Booth Theatre on Dec. 14, 1936, it was a stunning success with critics and audiences, and even won a Pulitzer Prize for drama (a rare feat at the time for a flat-out comedy).

A more sugary Hollywood movie of the play — starring Jean Arthur, Jimmy Stewart and Lionel Barrymore as Grandpa — also did well at the box office, and earned an Oscar for Capra, its director.

Though countless other stage and screen entertainments have drawn from the same bottomless well of misfit-family tales, Kaufman and Hart's standard is hard to best as a crowd-pleaser, with so many boisterous plot developments, zippy bon mots and likable zanies stuffed into a single script.

In the 1930s, however, the Sycamore family's laughable high jinks didn't click for everyone. When "You Can't Take It With You" had its London theatrical premiere, British critics and audiences found it not all that funny, and more than a little perplexing.

Maybe, in that day and age, you had to be a member of the broader American family to "get it."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com

Information in this article, originally published Nov. 23, 2008, was corrected Nov. 24, 2008. A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that "Light Up the Sky" was the first hit written by the team of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. It should have stated that "Once in a Lifetime" was the team's first hit; "Light Up the Sky" was written by Hart alone.