You Can’t Stop Kerri Norris

Seth Schouten

Sometimes the best solution to life’s hardships is laughter. Or so suggests Kerri Norris, the director of SAMC Theatre’s latest production. It has not been an easy time for Trinity Western University’s theatre department as of late. With its closure at the end of the Spring 2024 semester inching ever closer, perhaps the best solution to the department’s woes is to make people laugh.

Norris, who also works as a professor at TWU and is currently serving as the interim chair of the department, firmly believes in the importance of laughter in times of trouble. “In times of trouble, what do people want to do?” Norris asked rhetorically. “They want to see musicals, they want to see comedies. They want to be able to laugh because there is a lot of pain going on in their lives.”

For its third-to-last-ever play, the department is staging a production of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s comedy You Can’t Take It with You, which was first performed on Broadway in 1936 during the midst of the Great Depression. It won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was adapted into a film, directed by Frank Capra, in 1938 where it won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director. Since the rights to the script became licensable in 1939, the play has remained a favourite of many theatre groups both professional and amateur. Norris recalled acting in a production of the play at Vancouver’s Pacific Theatre.

I interviewed Norris about a week and a half before the show opened, right on the advent of “tech week,” a stretch of long and arduous rehearsals that incorporates sound and lighting effects with the actors’ performances. She was very enthusiastic about how the show was evolving and the work that she and her actors had completed.

“I feel like my focus and process is that when we go into that week of tech, I want the actors to feel solid in the story that they’re telling,” she said. “So that doesn’t mean that the work stops . . . but I want the framework of things to be able to support them through those final discoveries.”

Norris spoke about her desire to differentiate her production from others through many of the storytelling concepts that she has implemented. While she was cautious not to give away all of the show’s big surprises, she did mention that audience members will be able to take home bits and pieces of the show with them.

“I’m not going to give away all of what the concept contains, but the important thing is that we’re populating the space with things from our furniture and our props cabinets,” she said. “They’re going to be tagged. . . . If [the item has] got a green tag, you can just take it at the end of the show that night. . . . If it’s something that’s blue, that means that we just need it to the end of the run. . . . And there are a few things that are red-tagged because we’ve had to borrow some specific things or rent some specific things. You can’t take the xylophone we’ve rented from Long & McQuade,” she added with a laugh.

While You Can’t Take It with You is far from Norris’ first production at TWU—she has been a staple of the director’s roster since 2018’s Comedy of Errors—it will be her last before the department closes. The show carries a distinct emotional and thematic resonance for Norris as she closes out her time as a director. She points to two key questions that she has found herself asking through the process of creating this play: “What do I want to leave with?” and “What do I want to leave behind?”

Norris spoke quite fondly about working with the cast and how willing they were to follow her directorial vision as well as the amount of energy they were able to bring to the project. “When I would drive [home] with Stephen [Norris’ husband] every night, I would be like, ‘When are they going to say that I’m crazy?’ . . . I kept waiting for that moment to happen because I was asking a lot of them: to buy into a very specific concept of things, to frame this seemingly traditional play in a slightly different way, that I was never going to be satisfied and that we were always going to dig deeper and look for more. . . . And that never happened, which is such a gift to have everyone in the room working at that capacity and willing to invest so much all of the time and just not give up.”

Norris went on to describe the supportive environment created by the cast and the number of creative decisions that the cast had a hand in making: “They created a whole bunch of the stuff you’re going to see on stage. I had plans, and they came in and did something, and I’m like, ‘Well that’s better than what I thought of.’ I have no problem embracing what they bring in because I think my job is to shape things, and if they bring lots to the table, then I need to be open to what the journey is too.”

You Can’t Take It with You is a screwball comedy about the eccentric Vanderhof-Sycamore-Carmichael family and the many other oddballs who have taken residence in their home. After Alice Sycamore, the only “normal” member of the family, falls in love with Tony Kirby, the wealthy heir to a successful family business, the Vanderhof-Sycamore-Carmichael family finds themselves struggling to connect with Tony’s formal, traditional parents while trying to evade the government. Norris notes that the Vanderhof-Sycamore-Carmichaels are not particularly concerned about money; instead, they foster an attitude of encouraging people to pursue their passions, whether or not they are good at them.

“Ultimately, [the play] is about trying to live life passionately and with love,” said Norris. She mentioned that the play has a “farcical fabulousness” to it. “[In a screwball], things are crazy and zany. Things are taken to the extreme in certain circumstances,” said Norris describing the play’s comedic sensibilities. “But I think that a lot of the descriptors of this play don’t capture the other story that’s going on, which is Alice’s journey to figure out why she’s ashamed of her wacky family. So she almost has a counter-reaction to growing up in this environment and falls in love with someone she doesn’t think could fit. . . . How sad is that?”

“I really hope that [audience members] fall in love with the characters,” said Norris talking about her hopes for the audience’s reaction to the production. While Norris has been directing plays for many years, she still experiences the same anxieties on opening night. “I feel the same way on opening night for any play that I direct. I just want the audience to laugh at that time, and I just want them to give [the actors] their energy, and I just want them to see the magic that [the actors] have put together in rehearsal. It’s not actually about me wanting the actors to do it right; I want the audience to open themselves up and just go on the journey. . . . Like a mom, I sit in the back corner and I bite my nails.”

You Can’t Take It with You runs March 21 – April 1. Tickets are available at twu.ca/theatre.