‘You Can’t Take It’ Was Taken for Granted : Theater: Because the rights were readily available, it lacked the urgency and the cachet of “a hot new script,” SCR’s artistic director says of Hart-Kaufman classic that opens tonight.

When South Coast Repertory’s revival of “You Can’t Take It With You” opens here tonight, it will be the first time in the theater’s 27-year history that it has mounted anything by those acknowledged masters of American comedy, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman.

What makes the milestone particularly notable is not that the play needs an SCR Mainstage revival--”The sun rarely sets on a production somewhere,” notes Kaufman’s daughter, Anne Kaufman Schneider--but that SCR has tended to lavish attention on classic comedies of the British stage: Richard B. Sheridan’s “School for Scandal,” Alan Ayckbourn’s “A Chorus of Disapproval” and George Bernard Shaw’s “You Never Can Tell” and “Misalliance,” to name a few.

Why has the most successful of all the Hart-Kaufman collaborations been omitted from the SCR repertoire until now? It seems somewhat inexplicable even to SCR artistic director Martin Benson, who recalled the other day that the first play in which he ever appeared was a high school version of “You Can’t Take It With You.” The major reason SCR never got around to staging the play, he suggested, is that it simply was taken for granted. Because the rights always were readily available, it lacked both the urgency and the cachet of “a hot new script to be grabbed,” he said. In other words, the choice was a little too obvious.

But, Benson added, whenever he and producing artistic director David Emmes would look around for a comedy, “we found ourselves comparing it with ‘You Can’t Take It With You.’ We finally said, ‘For God’s sake, why don’t we just do it?’ It’s the most perfect play of its genre, the benchmark of American comedies.”

Kaufman and Hart themselves were struck by the obvious when they first conceived of the play, according to Kaufman biographer Malcolm Goldstein. They touted it as a “pip” of an idea, “like nothing ever seen on land or sea.” And when they got down to the actual writing, it took them less than a month, working together in Los Angeles during the summer of 1936, to sketch out a first draft.

The script was about “a slightly mad family, and has to do with the daughter of the house, the only sane one,” Kaufman wrote at the time to his wife. “She falls in love with the son of a conventional family, and the play proper concerns her attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable elements. The tony family comes to dinner--arriving on the wrong night--and finds everything at its most cuckoo. . . .

“But it has a point--that the way to live and be happy is just to go ahead and live and not pay attention to the world. I think the play will have a nice love story and a certain tenderness, in addition to its madness.”

They were so sure of the material, Goldstein points out, that even before they finished the first draft, they asked their producer to begin casting the roles. Which is not to say they knew what to call their comedy. They decided on the title “You Can’t Take It With You” (it comes from friendly advice given to Mr. Kirby, a Wall Street broker, in the third act) only after they considered “Foxy Grandpa,” “Money in the Bank” and “They Loved Each Other.”

The comedy opened on Broadway in December, 1936, won the Pulitzer Prize and ran for 837 performances. It was the biggest hit of the nine Hart-Kaufman collaborations, exceeding their two other best-known comedies--”Once in a Lifetime,” their first effort, in 1930, and “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” their eighth, in 1939.

Hart and Kaufman each earned a reputed $25,000 a week from six simultaneous productions of “You Can’t Take It With You”: the Broadway original, a quickly assembled Chicago version, three domestic touring companies and a London staging that ultimately proved unprofitable.

In the meantime, Hollywood director Frank Capra was so taken with the play that his boss at Columbia Pictures, the tight-fisted Harry Cohn, paid a record amount for the movie rights. “Producer Sam Harris’ asking price was staggering,” Capra recalls in his autobiography. “Two hundred thousand dollars! Harry Cohn’s squeal blew out phone fuses. ‘Tell that goniff Harris I wouldn’t shell out two hundred G’s for the Second Coming.’ ”

But he did, basically to settle a feud with Capra and to bring him back into the Columbia fold. When Capra’s movie opened at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in September, 1938, as Goldstein and others have noted, it was the first time a Broadway play and the Hollywood movie based on it competed against each other.

“Why this mania to film Kaufman and Hart’s play?” Capra writes. “Because it was a laugh riot? A Pulitzer Prize play? Of course. But I also saw something deeper, something greater. Hidden in (it) was a golden opportunity to dramatize Love Thy Neighbor in living drama. . . .

“The conflict: devour thy neighbor versus love thy neighbor. The weapons: a bank full of money against a houseful of love. The stakes: the future happiness of two young people . . . and more important, the viability of a lamb when confronted by a lion.”

Capra admits that he “tampered” with the characters, “threw out the play’s third act,” “reduced the love plot to counterpoint” and “elevated the philosophical conflict” about how best to lead one’s life. But the movie’s depiction of the zany Vanderhof household, a precursor of sorts to the hippie communes of 30 years later, doesn’t seem radically different from the play’s.

Kaufman, who died in 1961, typically “had a rather dim view of Hollywood and movies,” Schneider said in a recent telephone interview from Los Angeles. “He never had anything to do with the making of his own things into pictures.”

Nor did Kaufman communicate how he felt about Capra’s and screenwriter Robert Riskin’s departures from the play. “When my father finished something, he sort of turned his back on it,” Schneider recalled. “I think his and Moss Hart’s attitude was very much to take the money and run.”

Not surprisingly, Capra’s treatment of the material more or less set the directorial tone for uncounted stage productions, at thousands of community theaters. But it will not set the tone at SCR, says Warner Shook, who is directing this production.

“I have never seen the movie,” he said in a recent interview, “and when I knew I was going to direct the play, I didn’t want to. I haven’t changed a word of the script. There are no cuts either. I’m doing it exactly as written in 1936.”

Nevertheless, what Shook hopes to communicate with the SCR production sounds remarkably close to what Capra and, indeed, the playwrights themselves, have said they wanted to communicate.

“We’re playing the humanity,” Shook said. “From the humanity comes the love story and the humor and the zaniness. I think it’s a fortuitous time to be doing this play. The way the world is right now, people want to get in touch with things that mean the most to them.”

* “You Can’t Take It With You” opens tonight at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Performances continue through April 25, Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 7:30 p.m. with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2:30. Tickets: $23 to $30. Information: (714) 957-4033.