You Can’t Take It With You - But I Did! - BY TOM KANALEY

The year 1961 was an exciting time to be twenty-two years old. John Kennedy was President and it seemed there wasn’t anything that was not possible in this country. This was especially true for me, a first year junior high school American History teacher. My first teaching position was in Watkins Glen, N.Y., a charming rural village in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.

Winter in the Finger Lakes in 1961 was cold and snowy. I was looking for something interesting and challenging to do to pass the cold winter months in this beautiful small town where I began my teaching career. So, I joined the local community theater whose plan was to produce and present Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s “You Can’t Take It With You."

Rehearsals began in early February 1961. The play was scheduled to be presented to the community on March 15, 16 and 17.

I was cast in the role of Tony. Alice was played by Louise, a beautiful, talented, eighteen year old high school senior. Although Louise was never a student in any of my classes, our status was still teacher/student. As rehearsals progressed and Tony and Alice’s romance came to life on stage, Louise and I began to feel an attraction towards each other. We could never act on these feelings off stage, however, since I was a teacher and she was a student. To further complicate the drama of the play within the play, it just so happened that the director of this production was Louise’s mother, Jean Argetsinger, who was also a member of the school board.

Rehearsals continued, the play went on and was a smashing success. It sold out all three nights. Tom and Louise’s attraction also continued.

After Louise graduated in June we had our first real, public date. We then began our courtship. Louise went on to Vassar College as a drama major and I continued my career in education after moving to Rochester, N. Y. 

Tony (me) and Alice (Louise) eventually married and God gave us three beautiful children. One of whom is our daughter Jeanie - known to all as Jeanie Rapp. Did you ever wonder where this talented actress/director/producer got her passion for the theater?

I agree with Kaufman and Hart that you can’t take it with you…but thanks to their wonderful play - I did.



A Contract With the Artist - By Ilene Mitnick

You are about to come face to face with a humbling truth in David Hays’ adaptation of James Agee’s and Walker Evans' literary masterpiece, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” In 1936 Fortune magazine sent Agee and Evans to Alabama to produce a photographic and verbal record of living conditions among sharecropper families mired in desperate poverty. After eight weeks on assignment, Agee’s impassioned, and some say ‘subversive’ account of what has been called a departure from traditional journalism, was rejected by the magazine; however, in 1941, Houghton Mifflin published the now revered “…Famous Men.”

Artistic Director Jeanie Rapp’s passion for the avant-garde and desire to push the boundaries of the stage continue as she invites the audience into the intimate beginnings of staging a play. Rapp asserts that “the actors’ relationship with the text, the stage and the audience is raw and vulnerable and this reading allows you to witness that experience.”

A veteran set designer, Hays now wears his director’s hat, as well as an impressive writer/adapter’s hat, bringing us his vision of a book given to him 60 years ago. He says, “The tragedy of people ‘caught’ has haunted me since first reading it.” Hays’ desire is to deliver in a way that “puts you with these people,” he says “...right inside their lives so as to feel what it’s like to be so unable to make decisions in your own life.”

Just as Agee and Evans won a family’s trust in order to immerse themselves in their daily existence to give us words and pictures, we now invite Hays’ work to transport us to a place we’ve not known. To put ourselves in the boots of another. To explore a matter-of-fact approach to a myriad of dilemmas inherent during a dark period of history. And, to experience how, even in the most hopeless of conditions, humanity does prevail.

Margreta Stage embodies its tagline – A Theater of Discovery – as it opens a window for us to experience an undiluted deliberation of human dignity. A heart-wrenching story, by itself, doesn’t anchor a production. In order to be struck by the reality of a performance, we confront the relationships and the passions portrayed by the actors who must convincingly create a character and commit to the director’s vision. And what of the audience’s role? We watch for words, listen and construct a text as much as Agee, Evans and Hays have done. We shape our own experience as we synthesize new notions and images, which in many cases are expressions of ones that already exist. 

Our ability to feel an indigent tenant farmer’s pain requires us to surrender what is safe and comfortable – to suspend our current sense of self in order to be open to a performer’s influence. How else can we be dead center in someone else’s plight? When we open ourselves to a world through another’s eyes, we can tenderly unravel the words and pictures of Agee, Evans and Hays. 

But theater is not real life. Although, if you accept the contract between the artist and the audience, you may find relevance in the drama and you may experience an epiphany that inspires a kind of empathic, merciful stir.  Although we will be given only the outline of a family’s circumstances in this performance, we will live intimately with them feeling the pinch and the pulse of being trapped in uncertainty and despair. Yet we will also be audience to a larger composition as we witness their pride, strength and spirit.    

Agee went to great lengths to honor the tenant farmers as worthy and valued and captured it for a broader audience. The least we can do (if we’re keeping our side of the contract, that is) is be open to walking away with a different view of the world. We’ve just eavesdropped on other people’s stories. Some of them achingly sad. Some dignified.  But none less than human.  That’s why being here matters.