Edward Everett Horton. It closed there on June 17, 1944, having played 1,444 performances. Official Sites | Accessibility Statement Terms Privacy |StageAgent © 2020. (uncredited), Irate Dodgers Baseball Fan | | Jack Carson. Joseph Kesselring had sent his original play, then titled Bodies in Our Cellar, to Stickney when she was starring opposite her husband Howard Lindsay on Broadway in Life With Father (opened in 1939), with a view to her playing Abby Brewster. 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). [4] Kesselring originally conceived the play as a heavy drama, but it is widely believed that producers Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse (who were also well known as play doctors) convinced Kesselring that it would be much more effective as a comedy. [5], Later revivals in the 1940s and 1950s had Bela Lugosi playing the role of Jonathan Brewster with box office returns reflecting better sales than when Boris Karloff traveled through the same cities.[6][7][8]. The play was directed by Bretaigne Windust, and opened on Broadway at the Fulton Theatre on January 10, 1941. The play Arsenic and Old Lace takes place on a September day in "present time," which, when it was written, was 1939. Learn how and when to remove this template message, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arsenic_and_Old_Lace_(play)&oldid=979049933, Internet Broadway Database person ID not in Wikidata, Articles needing additional references from December 2008, All articles needing additional references, Articles with unsourced statements from December 2017, Wikipedia articles in need of updating from December 2017, All Wikipedia articles in need of updating, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Arsenic and Old Lace characters breakdowns including full descriptions with standard casting requirements and expert analysis. | Mortimer Brewster is living a happy life: he has a steady job at a prominent New York newspaper, he’s just become engaged, and he gets to visit his sweet spinster aunts to announce the engagement. 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. [citation needed] A Broadway revival of the play ran from June 26, 1986, to January 3, 1987, at the 46th Street Theatre in New York, starring Polly Holliday, Jean Stapleton, Tony Roberts and Abe Vigoda. This Study Guide consists of approximately 36 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Arsenic and Old Lace. When Kesselring taught at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas, he 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.