Broadway Comedies: The Royal Family / Animal Crackers / June Moon / Once in a Lifetime / of Thee I Sing / You Can’t Take It with You / Dinner at Eight / Stage Door / The Man Who Came to Dinner

If Eugene O’Neill represents the tragic mask of American drama, then George S. Kaufman can easily lay claim to its smiling counterpart. No other comic dramatist in America has enjoyed more popular success or been more fortunate in his choice of collaborators, which included George and Ira Gershwin, Moss Hart, Irving Berlin, and the Marx Brothers. Here, in the most comprehensive collection of Kaufman’s plays ever assembled, are nine plays: his “backstage” play The Royal Family (1927, written w Edna Ferber); the Marx Brothers-inspired mayhem of Animal Crackers (1928, with Morrie Ryskind), in a version discovered in Groucho Marx’s papers and published here for the first time; June Moon (1929, with Ring Lardner), a look at a young composer trying to make it big on Tin Pan Alley; Once in a Lifetime (1930, with Moss Hart), one of the first satires of Hollywood; Pulitzer Prize winners Of Thee I Sing (1931, with Morrie Ryskind and Ira Gershwin) and You Can’t Take It with You (1936, w Moss Hart); Dinner at Eight (1932, w Edna Ferber), a ensemble piece that mixes comedy and melodrama; Stage Door (1936, w Edna Ferber), his story about young actresses trying to make it in NYC; and The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939, w Moss Hart), a burlesque of America’s cult of celebrity. These plays are reminders of Broadway in its glory days.