“YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU”

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20639, 30 January 1937, Page 14

“YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU”

NEW YORK’S NEW PLAY SUCCESS OF AMERICAN WRITERS George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, the Americans have concocted another funny play for the delectation of fond audiences that are quite willing to go to anything these collaborators write, funny or not. This one is "You Can’t Take It with You,” perhaps the most kindly of all their plays—unlike their "Once in a Lifetime” in that it never attempts to satirize its characters. They know well the formula for success in the theatre, these two bright young men; they have an unusual skill and a ready wit and they nevel fail. Furthermore, the adroitness of Mr Kaufman as a director shows itself once again in the casting and the work of the players.

The authors have taken as their subject matter the strange characters and unusual conduct of a household in which almost anything may happen. They are eccentrics these people—or, if you prefer, so completely natural and self-unconscious that they merely seem strange by contrast with most of the rest of the world, the conduct of which is conditioned by all sorts of restraints, conventions, vain hopes and baseless fears. These folk do eactly what they want to do, obey without questioning every impulse. The amiable grandfather of the family set its standards when, thirty-five years before the play begins, going up in the elevator of his office one day, he wondered why he had ever thought it sensible to go to an office every day and, concluding that it wasn’t sensible at all, remained in the elevator, swent down in it and never entered an office again. All the other members of the family found themselves free to follow his example and do whatever they liked.

In the first act we meet all these astonishing people and laugh at the comical things they do and say. But so eccentric are they that we wonder if there can be anything in the way of eccentricity left for them to do the rest of the evening. No doubt the authors, having gone this far, wondered, too, where else there was for them to go. Tire trick they employ to bring back the interest is to pile eccentricity upon eccentricity increasing the pace, and at the moment when every member of the household is being as ridiculous as possible, to bring in three utterly conventional people. The effect is. as was intended, comic.

But it is hardly so comic as it would be if the same trick had not been played many times in the theatre before. The family had a daughter unlike all the rest. She works in an office, and she is in love with the son of her employer. And, in accordance with another old formula for plot making, the girl and the boy are estranged., This happens, as always, at the end of the second act. The third act brings them together again. Though they have written of the most unconventional of families, the authors have, you see, taken great care to risk nothing by being unconventional themselves. They stick to the rule of success in the theatre, the easiest kind of success. The comedy is beautifully played, with Henry Travers, Paula Trueman, Josephine Hull and George Tobias shining with especial brightness in the more important roles. It is all very genial. “Brother Rat,” though it does net sound so, is genial, too, a play about life among the eager young men in a

military academy. The fun here is of the collegiate sort, with the boys, all nice boys, getting themselves into scrapes and out of scrapes and then into worse scrapes. They are all jolly boys with pleasing things to say. The girls are sweet and frolicsome. The play is a most agreeable bit of homely, refreshing, youthful comedy. Two young men, John Monks Jr. and Fred F. Finklehoffe, fairly recent graduates of the Virginia Military Institute, where the scenes are laid, wrote “Brother Rat” and the shrewd George Abbott has done such things to it by his staging as only he can do.

The author of “The .Children’s Hour,” one of the most successful plays of recent years, has written her second play and New York had the opportunity of seeing it last week. Unhappily in “Days to Come” Lillian Hellman, having proved in her first effort that she can piece a play together in something like masterly fashion, tries in her second to go in rather deeply for ideas. She doesn't want, obviously, to be a mere play-carpenter. But the skill of the carpenter does not always bring along with it the wisdom of the philosopher nor the kind of articulateness needed to make philosophies clear in the theatre. “Days to Come” turned out to be a muddled and unbecomingly obese drama in spite of stretches of very fine dramatic writing. It had hardly opened when the closing date was announced.