Fun times amid tough times in LVA play

Consider the title: "You Can't Take It With You."

Would there be much left to take anymore?

But if Great Depression audiences found solace in the merry Moss Hart-George S. Kaufman comedy, Great Recession theatergoers might find escape as well in the company of the madcap Sycamores.

"It's so relevant because people living through the Depression learned life wisdom that we have yet to learn today," says Melissa Lilly, director of the production that's geared for guffaws and staged at the Las Vegas Academy of International Studies, Performing and Visual Arts. "I love the timeless themes, the idea that money doesn't buy happiness, that hope is going to prevail even through a time of fear, and enjoying life to the utmost within the moment."

First produced onstage in 1936 and translated into a Frank Capra film favorite two years later, "You Can't Take It With You" focuses on twin families -- the loving, loony Sycamores and the unfun, unhappy Kirbys -- who are linked as Sycamore daughter Alice falls for Kirby kid Tony.

"Romeo and Juliet" with a laugh track. Shakespeare as screwball comedy.

When the eccentrics host the conservatives for dinner, their polar-opposite personalities convince Alice that marriage would be a disaster from "I Do" onward. But Tony realizes that the Sycamores' philosophy -- the pursuit of joy and enjoyment of each other -- is sanity in disguise, that what others dismiss as madness is the best response to a world gone mad. Will the stuffy, straitjacketed Kirbys embrace the ethos of the delightfully daffy Sycamores?

It's a feel-good farce. Whaddaya think?

Though a theatrical artifact from a long-ago era, the play's lesson of life as a cherished commodity should resonate for contemporary audiences coping in a tough economic era, when joy might be missing from many people's lives. "We've taken a look at the Great Depression and made comparisons to then and now, and the kids get it immediately," Lilly says about her student thespians, though she also had to acquaint them with the quick-quips pace of screwball comedy that dazzled audiences decades ago.

"We do speed rehearsals, running it as quickly as we can, everything in fast-forward motion, then we reduce it to half, then we cut it in half again, and that's the pace we want," she says, and even then the three-act piece, with an intermission, clocks in at just under two hours. "And I've got a cast of innately funny people. At the first read-through, I (marked) each time we laughed throughout the play, and it added up to 52 laughs. Kaufman and Hart were craftsmen with these jokes they wrote, plus they tell a good story."

Playing the caught-between-two-families role of Tony, Ryan Wesen needed a couple of passes at the script before he felt its kinetic comic energy. "I had to read it a few times to make sense of it, then I watched the movie with Jimmy Stewart and I really got into the play," Wesen says.

"What drew me in was the relationship of the family. The most important aspect of the play is not about being funny, it's about how important they are to each other and the love they have, and that's missing in a lot of families in a lot of modern plays. There's not a moment in this play when anyone tries to harm anyone else, they always have the best intentions, and that's refreshing."

Lilly also cites the play's emphasis on individuality, especially appropriate given its cast. "It's also about the joy of being different and that resonates here at Las Vegas Academy because we have such unique individuals at our school, and part of the school's mission is to celebrate that," she says. "Nonconformity is certainly a way of life at the Sycamores."

The playwrights were right. You can't take it with you -- not your 401k (if you still have one), not your SUV (if you still drive one), nada.

But some hearty laughs might extend your life long enough to really enjoy them.

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld @reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0256.