You Can't Take It With You
Originally printed in the Friday, July 30 2004
edition of the Oregonian
Reviewed by Richard Wattenberg

"YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU": Mt. Hood Repertory Theatre Company launches its eighth annual American Classics Theatre Festival with a sensitive if somewhat low-key production of this fun-filled Kaufman and Hart 1936 comedy.

At the center of the play is the affable patriarch Grandpa Martin Vanderhof (played here with soft-spoken, laid-back gentleness by George Fosgate) and his family of wonderful eccentrics. Writing dramas, painting pictures, printing slogans, baking candy, learning ballet or inventing fireworks, these wonderfully idiosyncratic characters are all blissfully content. The play affirms individualism, but in portraying how these family members accept and embrace each other and anybody else who joins in their unabashed reverence for self-expression, it also represents the virtues of community. Chaos and order are playfully balanced in this celebration of American democratic idealism.

This production fares well with the most explosive and hilariously frenzied moments that punctuate Act 2, but it has difficulty maintaining energy before and between these moments. It is almost as if the effort to fill the large stage space occasionally results in a diffusion of the play's exuberance. Warmth and affection pervade the evening, and yet the Vanderhofs' and their friends' zaniness often seems a bit muted.

Director Tobias Andersen is very successful in developing the play's love interest. Jessica Allis Mockett nicely conveys the wholesome earnestness of Alice, the "normal" family member, and Spencer Conway is especially strong, playing her boyfriend, Tony, with winning self-assurance.

Continues 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through Aug. 15. Mt. Hood Repertory Theatre Company in the Mt. Hood Community College Theatre, 26000 S.E. Stark St., Gresham; $17 general, $14 for students/seniors, 503-491-5950. -- Richard Wattenberg Special to The Oregonian

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