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Insights A Study Guide to the Utah Shakespeare Festival Arsenic and Old Lace The articles in this study guide are not meant to mirror or interpret any productions at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. They are meant, instead, to be an educational jumping-off point to understanding and enjoying the plays (in any production at any theatre) a bit more thoroughly. Therefore the stories of the plays and the interpretative articles (and even characters, at times) may differ dramatically from what is ultimately produced on the Festival’s stages. The Study Guide is published by the Utah Shakespeare Festival, 351 West Center Street; Cedar City, UT 84720. Bruce C. Lee, communications director and editor; Phil Hermansen, art director. Copyright © 2011, Utah Shakespeare Festival. Please feel free to download and print The Study Guide, as long as you do not remove any identifying mark of the Utah Shakespeare Festival. For more information about Festival education programs: Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street Cedar City, Utah 84720 435-586-7880 www.bard.org. Cover photo: Leslie Brott (left) and Laurie Birmingham in Arsenic and Old Lace, 2001 Contents ArsenicInformation and on Old the Play Lace Synopsis 4 Characters 5 About the Playwright 6 Scholarly Articles on the Play A Play about Plays 8 Would-Be Serious Play into a Zany Farce 10 Utah Shakespeare Festival 3 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Synopsis: Arsenic and Old Lace Arsenic and Old Lace opens in the living room of the Brewster home, inhabited by two spinster aunts, Abby and Martha Brewster, and their nephew, Teddy. Rev. Dr. Harper is chat- ting with Abby about her other nephew, Mortimer, who in love with the reverend’s daughter, Elaine. Soon joining the conversation are two friendly police officers, Brophy and Klein, who have come by (as they often do) to pick up a box for charity from the kindly Brewster sisters. Theodore, who is rather crazy but harmless, thinks he is Theodore Roosevelt and charges up the stairs to retrieve the box. The reverend and the policemen leave, only to be replaced by Mortimer, who announces to his aunts that he intends to marry Elaine, whom he is taking to a play that evening. However, the happy family starts to unravel when Mortimer lifts the lid to the window seat and discovers a dead body within. He immediately assumes that Teddy has killed the man. However, Abby and Martha tell Mortimer that it was they who poisoned the man with their homemade elderberry wine—and that he is the eleventh (or twelfth, depending on how you count) gentleman they have shared their wine with. The sisters explain that these are charitable acts: They befriend lonely older gentlemen who do not have much to live for and then kill them with elderberry wine laced with arsenic. They continue that Mortimer should not worry because Teddy is down in the cellar digging what he believes is the Panama Canal, but is in reality the latest grave. Just then Elaine arrives and an exited and worried Mortimer tells her they are not going to the theatre afterall. After a brief quarrel, Elaine leaves. About this time, Mortimer and Teddy’s brother, Jonathan, shows up. Jonathan, a true maniacal criminal, is accompanied by Dr. Einstein, a plastic surgeon of doubtful character. Dr. Einstein has changed Jonathan so that he looks like Boris Karloff, the horror film star. Teddy invites Einstein to join him in the cellar, where he is supposedly digging the Panama Canal. Einstein quickly returns and confides to Jonathan that there is a hole large enough to bury Mr. Spenalzo (a man Jonathan recently killed) after everyone goes to bed. Once the lights are out and everyone is supposedly asleep, Teddy goes to the window seat to get Mr. Hoskins, and Jonathan and Einstein go to their car to get Mr. Spenalzo, both planning on filling the hole in the cellar. Thus begins several hilarious scenes of lights blinking on and off, of bodies being moved from the window seat to the cellar to the car outside, and of accusations and threats back and forth. Because of the commotion at the house, Officer O’Hara stops by to make sure all is well. When he is convinced that everything is alright, he shifts topics and corners Mortimer in a dis- cussion of a play he is writing. Just then, Lieutenant Rooney bursts in and recognizes Jonathan as an escapee from a prison for the criminally insane. Jonathan tells the officers about the bodies in the cellar, but they don’t believe him and take him off to prison. Einstein gets away, and Theodore is certified insane and taken to the Happy Dale Sanitarium. Trying to protect society without sending his aunts to prison, Mortimer ecstatically agrees when his aunts insist on going to Happy Dale with their nephew. The aunts then kindly inform Mortimer that he is actually not a member of the Brewster family. He was an illegitimate child and thus can marry Elaine without fear of passing the Brewster insanity on to his children. Mortimer happily departs, but before the women leave their house, they offer a drink to the head of Happy Dale, Mr. Witherspoon. Witherspoon is a lonely older gentleman, and he gladly accepts a glass of the spiked elderberry wine. 4 Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Characters: Arsenic and Old Lace Abby Brewster: A darling lady in her sixties who poisons elderly men. Abby is the sister of Martha and an aunt to Teddy, Jonathan, and Mortimer. The Rev. Dr. Harper: Minister and father of Elaine Teddy Brewster: Nephew of Abby and Martha Brewster, Teddy is a man in his forties who thinks that he is Theodore Roosevelt. Officer Brophy: A police officer Officer Klein: A police officer Martha Brewster: A sweet elderly woman with Victorian charm who poisons elderly men, Martha is the sister of Abby and an aunt to Teddy, Jonathan, and Mortimer. Elaine Harper: An attractive girl in her twenties and Mortimer’s fiancee, Elaine is the daughter of the Rev. Dr. Harper. She is surprisingly wise in the ways of the world for a minister’s daughter. Mortimer Brewster: Nephew of Abby and Martha, Mortimer is a drama critic who is engaged to Elaine. He is a nice man who cares for his aunts. Mr. Gibbs: A man who wishes to rent a room from the Brewster sisters Jonathan Brewster: Nephew of Abby and Martha Brewster, Jonathan is a psychopath who has had plastic surgery and now looks like Boris Karloff. Dr. Einstein: A plastic surgeon and an alcoholic who is in his fifties, Dr. Einstein has changed Jonathan’s face three times. Officer O’Hara: A police officer, O’Hara is a would-be playwright who pesters Mortimer to read his play. Lieutenant Roony: A tough and dominating police officer Mr. Witherspoon: The superintendent of Happy Dale Sanitarium Utah Shakespeare Festival 5 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 About the Playwright: Joseph O. Kesselring By Stephanie Chidester Insights, 2001 Joseph Otto Kesselring was born in New York City on June 21, 1902. His career was always linked in some way to the theatre. At the age of twenty, he began teaching music and directing amateur theatre productions at Bethel College in Newton, Kansas; at twenty- three, he left academia to pursue acting, writing short stories, and producing vaudeville plays; and at thirty-one—one year after his marriage to Charlotte Elsheimer—he devoted himself to writing, continuing to pen short stories and initiating his career as a playwright. Between 1933 and his death in 1967, he authored twelve plays—mostly light comedies. His first play to be produced, Aggie Appleby, Maker of Men, premiered in 1933, and four later plays were produced on Broadway: There’s Wisdom in Women (1935), Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), Four Twelves Are 48 (1951), and Mother of That Wisdom (1963). However, most of these received little positive attention. Brooks Atkinson’s review of There’s Wisdom in Women was less than glowing: “Two women, one man and a faithful friend loitering hopefully around the corner, a few smashing bars of concerto music, some reasonably bawdy conversation, and there you have the pattern of a comedy by Joseph O. Kesselring. You have also, a formula for routine playwrighting that needs the breeziest lines . to keep it on the bright side of entertainment. But is Mr. Kesselring’s wis- dom of women old hat or comedy con brio? The question is difficult to answer simply, but there is too much old hat in it for the comfort of this play reviewer” (“There’s Wisdom in Women: A Comedy in Three Acts.” The New York Times 31 Oct. 1935: 17). Walter Kerr’s review of Four Twelves Are 48 was even more cutting: “[Kesselring has] conceived a comic situation which takes precisely four minutes’ acting time to exploit. I believe Mr. Kesselring once wrote plays for what is known as the amateur market, and if so he has come down with an occupational complaint. A writer for the amateur market is under injunction to avoid, as the plague, Sex and Swearing. After some years of feeling unduly bound by these limitations, and prostrate from the effort to think up new twists on the junior prom, he fondly begins to imagine that all he has to do to make his work professional is to add the missing ingredients. Whereupon he adds them in the lavish manner of a little boy who is determined to show that he has grown up, his play closes, and he is right back at the junior prom.

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