Interview with Moss Hart's son, Chris Hart

Ted Sod, Roundabout's Education Dramaturg, sat down with Chris Hart, the son of Moss Hart, the Pulitzer Prize winner and co-playwright of You Can't Take It With You.

Ted Sod: Your father, Moss Hart, was a distinguished playwright/screenwriter/director/producer who died when you were 12. You are a director and a producer as well. What have you learned about working in the theatre from him or his legacy?

Christopher Hart: As a young man with celebrity parents I yearned to ignore my heritage (or, more precisely, have other people ignore my famous parents) and "make it" in my chosen career entirely on my own merit (which of course never happens, you're always found out). After I got over that delusion, I had the good fortune to direct my first professional production with one of my Dad's masterpieces, The Man Who Came To Dinner. What it taught me was how beautifully the Kaufman and Hart plays are constructed: with economy, and wit, and warmth, and a sensibility, and heart/Hart that appeals to every stripe of theatregoers. It was a gift that can't be underestimated.

TS: You Can't Take It with You, which he co-wrote with frequent collaborator George S. Kaufman, had a run of over 800 performances on Broadway in 1936-38. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A film version was directed by Frank Capra in 1938. It is constantly produced by theatres all over the world. Why do you think the play has been so successful?

CH: There have been two previous Broadway revivals: one in 1962, when Ellis Rabb directed the Association of Producing Artist's production with Rosemary Harris playing Alice, and then again in1982-83, when Rabb directed Jason Robards playing Grandpa. That revival ran almost two years. The Capra movie, which won an Academy Award for Best Picture in 1938, was a completely different animal from the Kaufman and Hart play. Capra, using the same characters, turned it into one of his populist political potboilers about the corporate evil-doers trying to take advantage of the little guy. His movie was really more about Mr. Kirby and his relationship with his son than about Grandpa Vanderhof and his family of eccentrics, who've found the secret of enjoying the simple pleasures in life. You Can't Take It With You, the play, was written in the Depression and has a lot to say about our current travails left by our "Great Recession." The success of the play rests with the universality of the themes of familial love and the idea that riches don't buy happiness.