George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart - play - 1936 - p. 189    

You Can’t Take it with You saw success in all of its forms, winning a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, running for more than 800 shows on Broadway, and garnering Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture as a film. The play, written by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, focuses on a quirky, multigenerational New York City family. The clan includes a tax-evading grandpa; his writer daughter Penny and her innovating husband, Paul; their daughter, Essie, who makes candy while nursing ballerina aspirations, and her xylophonist husband, Ed; and conventional Alice, who has a nine-to-five job in an office and alternates between affection and exasperation for her family.

The family is visited first by a government agent seeking redress for Grandpa’s tax evasion, and second by Tony, Alice’s boyfriend and the son of a chief executive at the company she works for. Conflict arises as Alice faces doubts that their families will ever be able to get along. The difficulties escalate further when Department of Justice agents return to investigate Grandpa and find suspiciously marked packages. Strange as the Sycamore family seems, it soon becomes clear that rest of the world is just as strange or stranger in its own way.

Key elements: marriage