Thursday night, we went to see the local high school�s production of �You Can�t Take It With You.� I love �You Can�t Take It With You.� This 1938 play is a celebration of eccentrics. Being an eccentric, I relate and relish the play�s verve for life.

While the play is delightful, the play also is subversive and was intended to be subversive. The play suggests that one should live for what one enjoys, not what others expect. Wall Street, for one thing, gets very short shrift. Even art is a target. The playwrights suggest that art is worth doing for the excitement of it and never mind if one is actually good at it. The mother, for example, writes plays simply because someone delivered a typewriter years ago and, after spending two years learning to type, she discovered she enjoyed writing plays. The play makes it quite clear that the plays are perfectly awful but the play also makes you admire and enjoy the mother and her efforts.

Kat had to go as part of a class assignment and the rest of us went just for the fun of it. The acting was wonderful, the sets were gorgeous, the costumes were perfect, and the make-up job was enthusiastic. The only problem was the script. The end of Act II had been altered to protect delicate sensibilities in light of current events.

The editing shocked me. Yes, it is true that this comedy�s second act ends with one of the eccentric characters making threats against the government just because he read them somewhere and he likes to use his printing press. Yes, it is true that many of us seem to be allergic to any hints of such threats�and yet.

The program indicated that the alteration was because people might be �uncomfortable.� It went on to note that even having the character print �Down with the White House� might make some people uncomfortable but that they could not go farther with editing or the plot would suffer. Or perhaps they were referring to the explosion in the basement of the fireworks that are the father�s hobby although that did not seem to have been altered.

Think of that. A subversive play �had� to be edited because it might make its audience uncomfortable. While the humor might have ended up being just a tad darker than intended, it was intended as somewhat dark humor. I belong to generations who have survived by realizing that we most need to laugh at horror when horror is most horrible. If the editing didn�t make Kaufman and Hart (the playwrights) roll over in their graves, it should have.

In any event, whatever gives us the impression that art is not supposed to make us uncomfortable? Worse, what gives us the impression that history (and this play has some history to it) should be re-written to be more palatable?

Apparently, not only can�t you take it with you, you can�t play it as written anymore either.

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