The eccentric Sycamore family is poor and unemployed during the Great Depression, but that does not stop them from enjoying life in “You Can’t Take It with You,” an award-winning comedic play put on by Sacramento State’s theater and dance department.

Theater and dance professor Michelle Felten is directing the play, which will take place in Playwrights Theater in Shasta Hall.

Alice Sycamore and Tony Kirby are in love, but Alice fears that her unusual family will scare away the wealthy Kirby family. When Alice and Tony decide to get married, Tony brings his parents to the Sycamore house in New York City for dinner.

Alice tells her family to try to act normal on the night the Kirbys come for dinner, which is easier said than done for the Sycamores.

The Kirby family arrives to the chaotic scene of snake feeding, a ballet lesson, firework making and a drunken actress passed out on the living room couch. The night ends when federal agents storm the house and arrest everyone.

But it is nothing too out of the ordinary for the Sycamores.

Although there is not a dull moment throughout the play inside the family’s house, moments of serious conflict still arise in the midst of all the chaos.

Alice is continuously annoyed with her chaotic family that cannot seem to do anything productive or normal. She wishes that they could be more like Tony’s much more stable and calm family. Playwrights George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart wrote the play in the 1930s and it soon became a big success. It opened in December 1936 in New York, and ran for 837 performances on Broadway.

The play was adopted into a film in 1938 and won the Academy Award for best picture.

Although the play was written in the 1930s, Felten said it is still relevant today. The core values of the play express the idea that gathering material wealth is not as important as personal relationships with family and friends.

The cast and crew have been rehearsing the production for six weeks after starting in late September.

“It’s always really exciting to watch the actors grow and change,” Felten said.

She said she enjoys the rehearsal process because that is when creativity is expressed as students try new things and portray their characters for the first time.

“The rehearsal for me is the most fun because that’s where the journey is. Performance is the end result, which is also very rewarding to see how successful you are at your journey,” Felten said.

Shane Turner, senior theater arts major, is playing a Russian ballet teacher in the production. He said the actors worked very hard to create a believable bond between the family members during rehearsal.

Turner said his most memorable moment of rehearsal came when the actors performed their first read through of the play and they got to hear each other’s interpretations of the characters and interact for the first time. He said he hopes the hilarity of the first run through comes through during their performances.

“We had to stop and just wipe the tears from our eyes because we were laughing so hard,” he said.

Turner said he enjoyed the range of experience in the production.

“We had the freshness of the new actors and then we had the ability of the older ones and they all kind of melded together really nicely,” he said.

The set takes place in the living room of the Sycamore house. The theater and dance group not only created an authentic-looking living room, but also made the audience feel like they were inside the room by hanging props from the ceiling.

Props that hung from the ceiling included things such as bicycles, chairs and postcards.

“We’ve had a couple people walk in and say “Wow, I think I’ll have Thanksgiving dinner here because it looks like a nice warm house to be in,'” Felten said.

A dinner was what the play opened and ended with, both on very different terms.

This production uses a three-quarter thrust stage configuration, meaning that the audience surrounds three quarters of the stage instead of just sitting directly in front of it. Stewart said this made it more difficult to place actors on the stage in a balanced manner.

“It is especially difficult in that kind of three-quarter configuration because there are three sides of audience that all have to have a good viewpoint,” said senior theater and deaf studies major Tim Stewart, who plays the father of Tony Kirby in the production.

Turner said the set was constantly evolving as they added new props over the course of the production process.

“The set is a character itself. It’s a part of the family and it really reflects how eccentric we all are and how fun it really is in that house,” Turner said.

“You Can’t Take It with You” reminds us that family and friends are what is most important in life no matter how crazy they are. The Sycamores are a perfect example of that idea in this feel-good, hilarious play.

Tzahuiztil Sanchez can be reached at tsanchez@statehornet.com