Arsenic & Old Lace

SHOWTIMES

January 20 7:30pm
January 21  7:30pm - Performance canceled 
January 22  2:00pm - Performance canceled 
January 22  7:30pm - Performance canceled 
January 23  2:00pm
January 27  7:30pm
January 28  7:30pm
January 29  2:00pm - Sold Out Performance! 
January 29  7:30pm

Arsenic and Old Lace is a play by American playwright Joseph Kesselring, written in 1939.

The play is a farcical black comedy revolving around the Brewster family, descended from the Mayflower settlers but now composed of maniacs, most of them homicidal. The hero, Mortimer Brewster, is a drama critic who must deal with his crazy, murderous 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, Elaine Harper, who lives next door and is the daughter of the local minister.

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 to conceal his identity, and now looks like horror-film actor Boris Karloff.