Arsenic and Old Lace (play)

Arsenic and Old Lace
First edition, 1941
Written by	Joseph Kesselring
Characters	Mortimer Brewster Martha Brewster Abby Brewster Teddy Brewster Jonathan Brewster The Rev. Dr. Harper Elaine Harper Dr. Einstein
Date premiered	January 10, 1941 (1941-January-10)
Place premiered	Fulton Theatre (later named Helen Hayes Theatre)
Original language	English
Genre	Dark Comedy
Setting	The living room of the Brewster home in Brooklyn. The Present.

Arsenic and Old Lace is a play by the American playwright Joseph Kesselring, written in 1939. It has become best known through the film adaptation starring Cary Grant and directed by Frank Capra. The play was directed by Bretaigne Windust, and opened on January 10, 1941. On September 25, 1943, the play moved to the Hudson Theater. It closed there on June 17, 1944, having played 1,444 performances.

Of the twelve plays written by Kesselring, Arsenic and Old Lace was the most successful, and, according to the opening night review in The New York Times, the play was "so funny that none of us will ever forget it."

The play is a farcical black comedy revolving around the Brewster family, descended from the "Mayflower," but now composed of insane homicidal maniacs. The hero, Mortimer Brewster, is a drama critic who must deal with his crazy, homicidal family and local police in Brooklyn, NY, as he debates whether to go through with his recent promise to marry the woman he loves.

His family includes two spinster aunts who have taken to murdering lonely old men by poisoning them with a glass of home-made elderberry wine laced with arsenic, strychnine, and "just a pinch" of cyanide; a brother who believes he is Theodore Roosevelt and digs locks for the Panama Canal in the cellar of the Brewster home (which then serve as graves for the aunts' victims; he thinks that they died of Yellow Fever); and a murderous brother who has received plastic surgery performed by an alcoholic accomplice, Dr. Einstein (a character based on real-life gangland surgeon Joseph Moran) to conceal his identity, and now looks like horror-film actor Boris Karloff (a self-referential joke, as the part was originally played on Broadway by Karloff).