Loony Bin

By T.E. Kalem

YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman

The screwball as saint is a national fantasy figure cherished by U.S. playgoers. In Harvey, the pixilated hero is the only one who can see his imaginary 6-ft. rabbit of the same name. The play's message appears to be that all would be right with the world if more people could emulate happy drunks with benign hallucinations. In Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, the bar's sugar daddy dispenses intellectual chewing gum, yet the play's credo--"In the time of your life, live"--is a wistful tenet of U.S. workaday philosophy.

While less well crafted, You Can't Take It with You is a charter member of the same club. The current revival at Broadway's Plymouth Theater is amiable, but the tang of merriment goes flat. The cast is star-blessed but gives erratic performances. Director Ellis Rabb's pacing is arthritic. The comedy is only fitfully funny, and its characters are not zany enough for the absurdist logic of bedlam farce.

The Sycamores are a clan of 1936 dropouts. Grandpa, played by Jason Robards with a fixed, toothy grin, quit business 35 years ago, and turned his home into the Kingdom of Whim. His daughter (Elizabeth Wilson) writes gamy playscripts simply because a typewriter was accidentally delivered eight years earlier.

Her husband (Jack Dodson) and his helper (Bill McCutcheon), a man who once came to deliver the ice and forgot to leave, fashion fireworks in the cellar and could double as pyromaniacs. Add a son-in-law (Christopher Foster) who handprints Trotskyite slogans, his wife (Carol Androsky), a balletomaniac who could trade entrechats with a berserk ostrich, and her Russian emigre instructor, played by James Coco, who pounces on his role with the coarse ardor of a ham in heat.

The only Sycamore with access to the outside world is the younger daughter (Maureen Anderman). She works in a Wall Street banking firm and falls in love with the boss's son (Nicolas Surovy). Anderman is fetchingly good-looking, but she is a bundle of jitters in the part, and Surovy, approximating a somnambule in a Brooks Brothers shirt, scarcely kindles the fire of first love. When the suitor's stuffy parents (Richard Woods and Meg Mundy) appear on the wrong night for dinner, class warfare breaks loose, but don't bet on any unhappy endings.

Well into Act III, Colleen Dewhurst sweeps onstage imperiously in the cameo role of a Russian grand duchess in exile who works as a waitress at an automat. Her comic zest is infectious, and when she heads for the kitchen to whip up a batch of blintzes one knows instinctively that they will be more richly flavorsome than anything else in the play. --By T.E. Kalem This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.