‘Quiet quitting’ has nothing on ‘You Can’t Take It With You’

Thunder River serves up a loving and impressive production of the classic comedy

This production of a perennial favorite comedy is nothing short of a home run for Carbondale’s Thunder River Theatre Company. With a company of 19, director Missy Moore was able to successfully cast every single role with local actors who looked born to the parts. And while the Hart/Kaufman Pulitzer-Prize winner dates back to 1936, its themes regarding how to be a happy human in a capitalist society are as timely as ever.

The scene is the Upper West Side home of Martin Vanderhof — or Grandpa — a formerly successful businessman who one day decided he’d be a lot happier farting around the house playing darts and tending to his pet snakes than pursuing the almighty dollar and — horrors! — paying income taxes. We may have “quiet quitting” today but for Vanderhof, it more a very loud departure from his expected path.

Moore didn’t have to look far to find the perfect Grandpa, enlisting her own father Bob Moore to fill the role. Bob may be an old friend of mine, but had I never seen him before I’d’ve been struck by how perfectly matched he is to the part. With an ever-present smile and always on the lookout to be delighted by those around him (even pesky IRS agents and other undesirables), Moore seems as happy playing Grandpa as the character is starring in a sort-of unscripted drama he’s cast himself in the middle of. He may no longer be working, but he keeps busy observing and being endlessly amused by the eccentric cast of household characters comprised of family and others who popped by and never left.

Set during the later stages of the Great Depression and in the turbulent years leading up to World War II, the family home is a hotbed of mostly likeminded individuals content to follow their own whimsies regardless of pecuniary interest and all with the firm approval of the paterfamilias. There’s his daughter Penny (Trary Maddalone), who sits upstage before a typewriter she started using when it was delivered by accident. A writer of steamy melodamas that presumably never see the light of day, she’s a willing participant and observer of the goings-on. Maddalone is a hoot playing her as a bubbly urbanite who couldn’t care less if her plays ever get produced.

Her husband, Paul, is an over-zealous maker of fireworks played with appropriate goofiness by Christopher Wheatley. He’s accompanied by the family’s former iceman Mr. De Pinna who takes the brunt of the incendiary experiments, and the pair is quite funny as persistent tinkerers happy to get back to it despite the latest mishap. In a great example of even the smaller roles being well cast, William LeDent is a standout as Paul’s sidekick who says a lot without a ton of lines.

Front and center for much of the goings-on is dingbat candymaker and would-be ballerina Essie (Cassidy Willey), who’s as cute as she is hilarious displaying her dance moves pretty much nonstop. No matter that her Russian dance instructor Boris (an excellent Owen O’Farrell) thinks she sucks, Essie is all-in with the terpsichorean muse as she plays off her husband, Ed who’s both salesman for her candy output and amateur xylophone player and printer. Perfectly placed upstage and opposite Penny, Ed is played with understated enthusiasm by Gerald De Lisser.

The oddball in the family is Alice, a normal young woman enamored with Tony Kirby, the son of the wealthy man who owns the company she works at. Sophia Kai Higbie is fantastic playing the sanest character on set who nonetheless is driven crazy by her wacky family and is a bundle of nerves as she prepared to have Tony’s family over for dinner. This meeting is the centerpiece of the action in Act Two, and the train wreck of the two wildly disparate families fuels a great deal of the comedy as well as the more serious themes about who’s crazy here: the seemingly irresponsible denizens of Chez Vanderhof or the stressed-out and unhappy Kirbys.

I’m going to run out of superlatives here but as Tony, Elijah Pettet is just spot-on. He and Higbie have known each other since they were kids they told me after the show, and that familiarity plus impressive acting chops makes for strong chemistry between the young couple. What’s charming about the script is that both families, despite their differences, want the best for these two, and they’re willing to come to terms with each other to help them get there.

Tony’s father, the uptight businessman known only as Mr. Kirby, is well realized by Lee Sullivan while Mrs. Kirby, a spiritualist, is brought to life by Toddy Walters. An intentional mixup has brought the Kirbys to dinner one day early, and they’re horrified by the goings-on as well as the proposed fare: a can of Spam for everyone!

If that’s not enough action and characters, there’s also the maid Rheba (a perky Gabrielle Bailes) and her beau, the handyman Donald (a chipper Micha Schoepe who seems to enjoy the mayhem as much as anyone). There’s a drunken actress brought over to read one of Penny’s plays (Allison Fifield, having a blast as a besotted human set piece you can’t take your eyes off), a variety of government agents, and a down-on-her luck “Grand Duchess” (Nina Gabianelli) who shows up with Boris and starts cooking dinner.

There’s more, but I’ll leave it at that and simply say that the climax and resolution of all the action is immensely satisfying, amusing and touching all at once. There are so many moving parts to this play that it certainly could have sunk under its own weight, but the clever script is drum-tight and Missy Moore is entirely up to the task not only of a great deal of complex traffic management but of teasing out nearly a score of performances that all resonate on levels big and small. As the theatre’s new artistic director, Moore also brought together an outstanding crew that further added to this big show’s appeal from the stage management (Betsy Zaubler) to the set design (Colin Tugwell) to even having a dramaturg (Kayla Henley) to keep the historic underpinnings of the show on track.

It’s an impressive and loving presentation of one of the great American comedies, and a true community effort from the Roaring Fork Valley’s impressive pool of talent.