You Can't Take It With You is one of my favorite plays. It wasn't a week ago, which should tell you something about the current Lakewood Playhouse production.

It is a show full of characters. Not the way most plays are, but more in the, "He's quite a character" vein. A grandfather who hunts snakes and attends commencement ceremonies for fun. A mother who has written plays for eight years - not out of lifelong passion, but because eight years ago a typewriter was delivered to the home by mistake and needed to be used for something. A father who makes fireworks in the basement with a man who came by to deliver ice seven years before and never left.

But the play is not about the oddities of humanity. And it's not about a girl from this bizarre clan falling in love with a Wall Street executive, or income tax evasion, or Communist sympathies - though all of those serve to construct a vaguely haphazard plot around the characters.

You Can't Take It With You is about something more basic: people being happy because they are doing what they like to do. The first act ends with Grandpa uttering these thanks over family dinner: "Remember, all we ask is to just go along and be happy in our own sort of way."

Grandpa-his name is Martin Vanderhof, but no one calls him anything but Grandpa-is played to perfection by Michael Griswold. He's not outright strange, and has hobbies nobody would find particularly bizarre if he hadn't been doing them instead of working for the last thirty-five years. He is cheerful and joyous, but also fierce in his passion for spending life happy rather than wealthy.

The rest of the cast, and family, follow suit. Jane McKittrick turns in a rare but excellent performance as mediocre painter turned aimless playwright mother Penelope Sycamore. Katy Shockman brings an odd grace to the bubbly hopping of candy-maker and gleefully atrocious dancer Essie Carmichael. Lakewood mainstay Michael Dresdner adds another spot-on turn to his eccentric foreigners resume as Russian dance instructor and honorary family member Boris Kolenkhov, following his role as Mr. Paravicini in Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap to start the season.

The joy in the play, however, doesn't so much spring from individual performances. The show thrives on a feeling of family, and the players' ability to act like a family on stage, albeit an unusually bizarre and extended family. They feel oddly comfortable and at home with each other.

One great advantage of the thrust stage- the audience is seated on three sides of the stage, rather than just one, at Lakewood shows-is the actors are able to play to each other. To face every side at once, everyone ends up facing each other, a luxury not often afforded to a stage show. The conversations and movements feel more genuine when they are not directed all to a single side, and it adds to the experience of watching not a play, but a family in their living room.

And that's what You Can't Take It With You is here for. To show a family that seems awfully strange, but is also probably an awful lot like everyone else's. A bunch of people, living together, being happy. In their own sort of way.

[Lakewood Playhouse, You Can't Take It With You, through Feb. 28, 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, $14-$22, 5729 Lakewood Towne Center Boulevard Southwest, Lakewood, 253.588.0042]