George Washington Slept Here – George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart, 1940 ½★

When the Well Runs Dry

Country life was a popular subject for American entertainment in the 1940s, with movies like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, comic strips like “Li’l Abner,” even paintings like Andrew Wyeth “Christina’s World.” Why not screwball comedy, too?

The writing team of Kaufman & Hart, enjoying enough success from their collaborative playwriting to afford new homes in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, decided to make their next play about the experience of country living. George Washington Slept Here was the result.

While a good idea, the play suffers from all the triteness and contrivances of the pair’s earlier work with fewer sparks of originality. Perhaps because country comedies were not so popular in the beginning of the 1940s as they became in the end, there is a potted, been-there done-that feeling about the thing which maybe it doesn’t quite deserve.

I was bored nonetheless and not surprised that while it had some success on Broadway and even more success as a movie adaptation, it also spelled the end of Kaufman & Hart’s collaborative partnership.

Newton Fuller is a city man who takes his his wife Annabelle and daughter Madge to a Pennsylvania farmhouse with holes all over the place, a rusty plow in the living room, a cow in the kitchen, and no bathrooms or working plumbing. Then he surprises them with the news he has flushed their life savings into buying the place for them.

The Janney-Brown House in Lower Makefield Township, in Bucks County. In 2026 this house, part of a working farm, turned 340 years old. It is reachable to Manhattan by train, part of the attraction for playwrights Kaufman and Hart.
Image from https://www.lancasterfarming.com/townnews/agriculture/340-year-old-bucks-county-farm-s-future-up-in-the-air/article_89fa7e6b-1683-4c72-8ea0-a9d2ce20220e.html

It’s the history that matters, he keeps explaining:

NEWTON: Just think, Annabelle! George Washington slept here. George Washington!

ANNABELLE (looking around): Martha wasn’t a very good housekeeper. [Act I, scene i]

As the play continues, we learn about many other problems Newton has bought for his family, like a road to the farmhouse he can’t use and a well that won’t draw water.

Newton just doesn’t care, however. He’s got his mind set on being a country squire, watching the seasons change, and learning the names of all the insects which destroy his trees and pester his house guests. The more things go wrong, the more it whets his appetite:

NEWTON: Well – well, I’ve had this feeling that – I wanted something I could hang on to. A home, and a piece of land – that’s real. That lasts as long as anything lasts. Look at this house. It was standing here when this country started and it’s standing here today. And the way things are now it’s pretty wonderful to come back to a thing like this. That’s why I wanted it. I wanted it for all of us. Annabelle, don’t be angry. Say you’re not angry, please. [Act I, scene i]

George Washington visited many places in Pennsylvania during his time leading the Continental Army, like Valley Forge. But we learn that he never did sleep in the farmhouse the Fullers own. It turns out that was another famous general, Benedict Arnold.
Painting "George Washington Visiting Bartram's Garden In 1787" by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris from https://www.meisterdrucke.ie/fine-art-prints/Jean-Leon-Gerome-Ferris/42759/George-Washington-Visiting-Bartram%27s-Garden-in-1787.html

She is angry, though not enough to satisfy me. As a screwball comedy, you need an oaf like Newton to set the comedy in motion and give the straight players someone to bounce their wisecracks off, but in this play that’s all you get. Any sympathy for the Fullers’s plight or rooting interest in their future is lost; their situation instead is a mere springboard for slapstick gags and lazy barbs aimed at dumb Newton.

NEWTON (irrepressible): Gosh, I’m so full of pep – I don’t know – this air out here – I could tear a house down.

ANNABELLE: Well, start with this one. [Act I, scene ii]

A little later:

MR. KIMBER: Well, sir, we’ve drilled down four hundred and twenty feet, and what do you think? We just struck mud.

NEWTON: Mud?

ANNABELLE: Why, that’s fine. Bring me a glass, will you? [Act I, scene ii]

When George Washington Slept Here was produced on Broadway in October 1940, Percy Kilbride was singled out for favorable notice as Mr. Kimber, who introduces them to the farmhouse and hits them up for a few repairs which quickly escalate. He also played Kimber in the 1942 movie.
Image from https://www.rrauction.com/auctions/lot-detail/347322906680555-percy-kilbride-signed-photograph/

Since I’ve only liked one (Once In A Lifetime) of the six Kaufman & Hart plays I’ve read, I may not be the best judge of George Washington Slept Here. I find it slow and awkward and obvious and dulled by the passage of years. But Kaufman & Hart were major artists in their field, beloved together and apart by people more discerning than I. What did the public make of George Washington Slept Here?

Evidently not much. In a 1942 Modern Library collection of their plays, critic Brooks Atkinson reviews their career. In an otherwise glowing introduction, he acknowledges the popular movie made of the play but otherwise says George Washington Slept Here is “no more than a dutiful chore in playwriting and does not convey the real enjoyment the authors take in their country estates.”

The proof of their lack of personal involvement in their creation may be witnessed in the movie, a 1942 vehicle for radio star Jack Benny and Ann Sheridan, a top screen actor in her own right known at the time as “the Oomph Girl.” In the movie version, it was decided to make Ann as Annabelle the person buying the farmhouse and Jack as Newton the suffering, wisecracking spouse.

Ann Sheridan as Annabelle and Jack Benny as Newton in the 1942 film version of George Washington Slept Here. It was a modest success, and kept production costs low by reusing the set from Arsenic And Old Lace.
Image from https://happyotter666.blogspot.com/2014/01/george-washington-slept-here-1942.html

I can see that working much better. In the play, the wife gets all the clever one-liners but also seems dragged around by her stupid husband’s Don Quixote ideas. Even before women’s liberation, this kind of comedy would have had limited appeal. Having Benny, a master of slow burns and reactions, made so helpless by the decisions of his beautiful wife couldn’t help but play better.

It is perhaps a sign of Kaufman & Hart’s disengagement that this major change from the play was allowed to happen. Or maybe they saw it as a better idea, too. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Kaufman, the more experienced playwright of the two, was less involved, as the jokes are more tired and the gags more overdone this time around. Any sign of his glory days with the Marx Brothers is not in evidence.

The play kicks into a higher gear in the second and third acts, with new characters introduced. Annabelle’s bratty nephew Raymond hides under beds and generally makes himself a malevolent nuisance. Newton’s Uncle Stanley demands VIP attention on account of a fabulous inheritance Newton and Annabelle desperately count on.

Annabelle and Newton inspect their new home at the start of the film. The debris littering the floor includes an old oil can and ruined furniture. Many steps along the staircase leading upstairs are missing, along with screens for the windows.
Image from https://www.tcm.com/articles/92551/george-washington-slept-here

Much later we learn Stanley was cleaned out during the Depression and sponges off his relatives while pretending to be rich:

ANNABELLE (a long breath): That is the dirtiest trick I ever heard of in my life.

UNCLE STANLEY: Well, now, look at it the other way, Annabelle. Look at all the happiness I’ve given you – thinking about the money you thought you were going to get. [Act II, scene ii]

There’s also Preston, a nasty neighbor who holds the rights to the farm’s water and right-of-way, and a couple whose husband runs off with Madge and gets her pregnant. It’s an indicator of George Washington Slept Here’s thorough lack of engagement that nothing whatever is made of Madge’s situation, not even by Madge, and it is not brought up again.

If not for its early use of pastoral themes that became more popular through the years, or its place as the last Kaufman & Hart comedy, George Washington Slept Here would not be remembered at all. It has all the by-the-numbers weaknesses of screwball, but instead of a frothy whirl you get three acts of a family literally stuck in the mud.