SOURCE: Kaplan, Charles. “Two Depression Plays and Broadway's Popular Idealism.” American Quarterly 15, no. 4 (winter 1963): 579-85.

In the following essay, Kaplan explores the similarities between You Can't Take It with You and Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing.

It is a truism that, as the most public of the arts and the one therefore most immediately responsive to the pressures of its times, the drama may be considered a reliable indicator of current popular thought and sentiment. For the social and cultural historian, the ideas, subjects and themes presented onstage in any era provide useful clues to the states of mind prevailing in that era. This topicality of the theater, which is at once one of its most appealing qualities and a major source of its weakness, holds true whether we are dealing with Aristophanes or Albee. In the hands of a second-rate playwright, where topicality is all, the play...