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.
