Theater: From the Age of Innocence

You Can’t Take It With You. The phonograph is lower than the lights but the tune and the words are just audible: A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s

traces

An airline ticket to romantic places. The girl is in blue chiffon, the boy in a tuxedo, and they are dancing as if Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had coached them. They stop, gently holding each other, and then are held by an invisible silent partner, Eros perhaps, that mischievously demanding deity who turns a moment of playful diversion to the strong mysterious purposes of love.

The late George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart would scarcely have dreamed that a scene like this could form the tender touchstone of their 29-year-old farce-comedy, but Director Ellis Rabb and his gifted APA company have had the wit to see that two people falling honestly in love on a modern stage is a total surprise. They have further grasped that the ’30s can be nostalgically re-created as a golden age of moneyless innocence, and that in an era of black comedy, human comedy has vastly appealing warmth.

Of course, You Can’t Take It With You is still propelled by the zany character of the Sycamore family. Grandfather (Donald Moffat) is a business dropout who has devoted 35 years to raising a small colony of snakes in a goldfish tank in the living room. He is related to uncribbed spirits and surrounded by live-in transients. These errant moles of home industry manufacture and explode Fourth-of-July fireworks unperiodically, do ostrichy parodies of ballet, and massacre Beethoven on the xylophone. It does not dawn on

Alice Sycamore (Rosemary Harris) that her native clan is prodigiously eccentric until Tony Kirby (Clayton Corzatte) of the Wall Street Kirbys proposes to her. The Kirby family crest is the stuffed shirt, but it is lofted in surrender to the free-souled Sycamores after a hilariously impromptu dinner and an even more impromptu night in jail.

When a comedy is still vital after three decades, it cannot be living on gags alone. Something in You Can’t Take It With You stirs the get-away-from-it-all urge in the American psyche. Call it the raft complex, that free-floating armistice from all workaday concerns that Huck Finn declared as he drifted down the Mississippi. Whitman distilled that spirit when he wrote: “I loafe and invite my soul.”

For the APA company, You Can’t Take It With You may inaugurate a different sort of dream, a repertory theater housed on Broadway. Possessing in Rosemary Harris one of the most expressive actresses on the U.S. stage, ranging with intrepidity, intelligence and taste from Gorky’s The Lower Depths to Shaw’s Man and Superman, this troupe, after six years of existence, has received only token gifts from the cultural fund dispensers. Endorsed by critics and public, each of its productions is better than the last, and it may now take added heart that excellence will out.