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- <text>
- <title>
- (1930s) You Can't Take It With You
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1930s Highlights
- Theater
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- You Can't Take It With You
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>(December 28, 1936)
- </p>
- <p> You Can't Take It With You demonstrates that a pair of showmen
- can confect a magnificently funny show without bothering much
- about the plot. The plot of You Can't Take It With You is
- deliberately banal. Two young lovers are nearly parted because
- of their families, a dramatic situation which has not grown any
- younger since Pyramus & Thisbe. So theatrically threadbare is
- this narrative scheme that it takes an ignited dish of red fire
- to bring down the first act curtain, an off-stage explosion to
- close Act II. These punctuations are, however, not really
- necessary for in creating Grandpa Vanderhof (Henry Traver) and
- his clan--the Girl's family which the Boy's family views with
- alarm--the playwrights have conjured a species of dramatis
- personae which transcends plot, bursts the bonds of the
- established theatre and mounts into the stratosphere of great
- literary lunacy.</p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-