Dorset Players, Inc.
at the Dorset Playhouse

Quality community theatre since 1927

"You Can't Take It With You"

In the home of Martin Vanderhof (Grandpa), folks only do things that they enjoy. Grandpa fills his days going to commencements, collecting stamps, and keeping snakes. His daughter, Penny Sycamore, paints and writes plays because it makes her happy, despite being terrible at both. Her husband, Paul Sycamore, manufactures fireworks in the basement with Mr. DePinna, an ice man who showed up eight years before and never left. Paul and Penny's daughter, Essie Carmichael, makes candy that her husband, Ed Carmichael, sells door-to-door. Lacking style and grace, Essie still dreams of becoming a ballerina and has studied for years under Boris Kolenkhov, an escapee of the Russian Revolution. Ed is a xylophone player and amateur printer, printing up dinner menus for the family and little quotes that he places in Essie's candy boxes.

Things get complicated when Penny's "normal" daughter, Alice Sycamore, falls in love with Tony Kirby Jr., vice president of the company she works for, and invites him and his parents over for dinner. Pleading with her nutty family to tone down the antics to impress the very proper Kirbys, Alice is stunned when Tony and his parents show up a day early. Add in an IRS employee investigating Grandpa for tax evasion and a group of federal agents who mistake Ed Carmichael's innocent quotes for communist propaganda, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Written by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, "You Can't Take It With You" won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was the basis for the 1938 Academy Award winning film directed by Frank Capra. A Broadway revival of the play is planned for 2011.
Director Dom Degnon brought this brilliant comedy to life using Dorset stage favorites as well as several new faces. "You Can't Take It With You" ran on the Dorset Playhouse stage October 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, & 16 at 7:30pm and October 17th at 2:00pm.

Amanda Garcia..................Penny
Tracy Hughes.....................Essie
Vanessa Beattie.................Rheba
Paul Michael Brinker................Ed
John Sease.........................Paul
John Macri.....................DePinna
William Sease...................Donald
Dom Degnon..................Grandpa
Danielle Houston..................Alice
Todd Houston.....................Tony
Tom Ferguson...............Kolenkhov
Evan Pringle.......Henderson, G-Man
Janet Groom.......................Gay

Bob Fry.......................Mr. Kirby
Sherry Kratzer..............Mrs. Kirby
CeCe King..........................Olga
Stephen Trout...................G-Man

Cast List

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