Theatre: Arsenic and Old Lace at Pennsylvania Playhouse (February 2003)

Arsenic and Old Lace was written in 1939 and became best known through the subsequent film adaptation starring Cary Grant. The play opened on Broadway at the Fulton Theatre in 1941, then moved to the Hudson Theatre, where it closed in 1944, having played 1,444 performances.

Of the twelve plays written by playwright Joseph Kesselring, Arsenic and Old Lace was the most successful. It is a farcical dark 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, New York, 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).

The playwright once lived in a boarding house called the Goerz House, and many of the features of its living room are reflected in the Brewster sisters' living room, where the action of the play is set. The "murderous old lady" plot line may also have been inspired by actual events that occurred in a house on Prospect St in Windsor, Connecticut, where a woman, Amy Archer-Gilligan, took in boarders, promising "lifetime care", and poisoned them for their pensions. M. William Phelps book The Devil's Rooming House tells the story of the police officers and reporters from the Hartford Courant who solved the case. Kesselring originally conceived the play as a heavy drama, but was later convinced that it would be much more effective as a comedy.