George S. Kaufman (1889–1961)

I first read this when I was eleven. I don't think I quite understood everything, but I knew a good read when I saw it!

Years later I was able to attend the revival with Nathan Lane & Jean Smart (and a slightly miscast Harriet Harris)--what a delight to see these masters bringing the words to life. But this is one of those wonderful plays which read very, very well indeed. It's no doubt better with Nathan Lane, but just imagine Nathan Lane in your head and you will have a marvelous time show more reading the play yourself.

(And if you love it, then move on to You Can't Take It With You by the same authors, nearly as good, although it won the Pulitzer and this one didn't!)

The plot is genius: a horrible writer--I mean, a horrible person who writes well--is injured and forced to remain bedridden at a (wealthy) suburban home. Much of the play is his entertaining his famous friends, but there are subplots throughout that eventually pay off spectacularly.

A real treat, and aside from modern audiences being less and less able to recognize the allusions to then-current celebrity, it doesn't show its age one bit. show less

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/three-plays-by-george-s-kaufman-and-moss-hart/
https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/you-cant-take-it-with-you-1938-and-play-by-moss-...

I got this collection of 1930s plays five years ago, in the early stages of my Oscar-watching project, because the middle one of the three was the basis of a very successful film starring Lionel Barrymore. In fact all three of these plays were successfully adapted for the screen.

The scripts are prefaced by a short piece from each of show more the two authors, gently poking fun at each other and giving a sense of the relationship between two Broadway creators. They certainly seem to have got on with each other better than Gilbert and Sullivan.

The first play, Once in a Lifetime, is about a vaudeville trio, down on their luck because of the invention of talking movies which sucks the audience out of theatre, who go to Hollywood and try to make it big there. The dumb guy of the three ascends to huge cinematic power, and the punchline of the play is that the bad decisions he makes turn out to be very successful.

I thought it was really funny. I don’t always find it easy to read scripts, but here I had no difficulty differentiating the characters with their different voices. I noted that George Kaufman, one of the authors, also played the frustrated playwright Laurence Vail in the first Broadway cast.

The key character is Mary Daniels, the woman in the vaudeville trio, who gets the best lines and serves as the audience viewpoint character on what is happening in Hollywood. In the original Broadway production she was played by Jean Dixon.

The drunk actress Gay Wellington (and another comic turn, the Grand Duchess Olga) were among the cuts made by Riskin as he adapted You Can't Take It With You for the screen. Kirby’s background is much less developed in the play – the whole subplot involving property transactions, and the character of Mr Poppins, are inserted by Riskin into the film. The Vanderhofs have pet snakes rather than a raven. (Though I’m glad to say that the kitten is original.)

The guts of it are all the same, and one can see why the play won a Pulitzer as an uplifting tonic in depressing times. It’s a bit more misogynistic (as I said, two extra female characters who are only there as figures of fun, and Mrs Kirby gets a harder time) and more racist (Donald gets treated worse). There is a hilarious sequence during the Kirbys’ disastrous visit to the Vanderhof household, where Penny gets the Kirbys to play a word association game.

The third play, The Man Who Came to Dinner, is even more overtly a character study than the other two. A famous New York theatre critic slips on an icy patch while visiting Ohio and is immobilised in the home of his reluctant hosts for several weeks. There’s a bit of a comedy of middle-class manners here, but mainly it’s about the monstrous protagonist who is unaware of his own monstrosity.

I Imagine that this is simple to stage, in that the entire play takes place in the Ohio front room. It’s more of a one-joke story than the other two. The play was written for actor and critic Alexander Woolcott, who had behaved with abominable rudeness while visiting Hart’s family home; for some strange reason he bowed out of actually performing as the character based on himself, and it fell to Monty Woolley to do it on both stage and screen, giving his career an immense boost. The film stars him and Bette Davis. show less

A delightful little satire.

Some of the better known plays of George S. Kaufman, including some that are still performed today, such as You Can't Take it With You. It's a bit of a mixed bag, with some of the plays being a bit weak in the backbone, but the best of them make up for it. Even the lesser plays are worth reading, if only to see the history of theatre in mid-20th century United States. Most of these plays are not hilariously funny, at least on today's terms, but they have enough solid chuckles to deliver when show more they are supposed to. The pathos is also present, though sometimes a bit melodramatic for modern tastes. All in all, a good collection. show less