Kaufman and Hart's beloved, Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy centers on the wonderfully eccentric Sycamore-Vanderhof family, presided over by the genially anarchic Grandpa Vanderhof, who long ago quit his job because he simply stopped enjoying it and has spent his days ever since doing exactly as he pleases. Under his roof live a household of gleeful oddballs: a mother who writes unproduced plays because a typewriter was once delivered to the house by mistake, a father and his friend who manufacture fireworks in the basement, a daughter who studies ballet badly but enthusiastically, and various visitors who simply never left. Chaos erupts when the family's more conventional daughter, Alice, brings home her buttoned-up fiancé Tony Kirby and his stuffy, wealthy parents for a fateful dinner that arrives on the wrong night, exposing the Wall Street Kirbys to the full, uninhibited spectacle of the Vanderhof household, fireworks, ballet, and an inconvenient run-in with the FBI included. Beneath the farce lies a genuinely warm argument about living joyfully according to one's own values rather than chasing money and status, embodied in Grandpa's philosophy that life is too short not to do what makes you happy. Its irresistible blend of anarchic comedy and open-hearted sentiment made it one of the most enduringly popular American comedies, a perennial favorite of community and school theaters alike.

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