If you think your family is a little nuts, check out the kooky — and quite hilariously dangerous — characters of “Arsenic & Old Lace,” a revival now on stage at Waterfront Playhouse on Front Street in Key West.
The production, led by director and producer Tom Thayer, is a comedy of errors of the most delicious and deadly kind.
What happens when two sweet but sinister spinsters have a little extra time on their hands?
Why not take up a hobby? Knocking off a few — OK, 12 — elderly gentlemen guests sounds like a good place to start.
The secret, they say, is in the arsenic-spiked elderberry wine (with “just a pinch” of cyanide).
It’s a deadly homemade concoction that Abby (played by Gerri Louise Gates) and sister Martha (Peggy Montgomery) serve up to boarders in their 1930s Brooklyn home just to, uh, relieve the unsuspecting men’s lonely lives and presumably empty existence. A mercy-killing spree of sorts, the two eccentric aunties rationalize their actions to the comedy foil and nephew Mortimer, who looks on at all the gently-administered carnage in horror. Sending these sad souls off to the “peaceful great beyond” is the ladies’ endgame. Religious services for the Brewster sisters’ victims add a humorous spike to the macabre scene.
Dreamed up by New York City writer Joseph Kesselring in 1939, “Arsenic & Old Lace” was thought to be inspired in part by real-life events that happened in that decade. According to law enforcement, serial killer Amy Archer-Gilligan murdered between 20 and 30 people in a similar way — including a couple of her husbands — afterward burying the bodies at her own Connecticut “nursing home for invalids” (all politically incorrect terms now) before the crimes were eventually discovered.
The show at the Playhouse opens to an exquisitely presented — creaky yet elegant — Brooklyn home (created by set designer Michael Boyer) that just happens to be adjacent to a cemetery. The sisters are doddering around while their loony brother “Teddy” (Steve Miller) bugles his horn unrelentingly, convinced he is the literal embodiment of former U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt. Mathias Maloff steps into the scene as the cranky theater writer Mortimer Brewster, one of the sisters’ nephews. His newly engaged status to longtime gal pal Elaine (a cute and bold portrayal by Carolyn Cooper) has the aunties in throes of delight until Mortimer discovers the body of a man casually tucked into a bench by the window.
“What happened here?” he asks in disbelief. “The gentleman died because he drank some wine with poison in it,” the aunts explain casually. “Gentlemen just don’t die and end up in window seats,” the nephew retorts.
Tickets
‘Arsenic & Old Lace’ shows at Waterfront Playhouse through May 27. Visit waterfrontplayhouse.org for tickets. The box office is located at 407 Wall St. Call 305-294-5015 for more info.
During the show’s preview on May 8 at the Playhouse, Kesselring’s breakneck dialogue and physical comedy that defines the nearly 90-year-old stageplay had the Key West audience erupting with laughter at each turn of the zig-zagging plotlines. Cops (Ray West, Wayne Dapser, John Swann and Donna Stabile) come in to investigate all the mayhem. The policing, though, is at times as dysfunctional as the Brewster sisters themselves.
The fun ramps up when another brother, Jonathan, (portrayed with spectacular hilarity by John DeMicco), arrives with his own clever and deadly secrets. Zachary Franchini plays Jonathan’s sidekick Dr. Einstein, a quack plastic surgeon and the shady nephew’s reluctant partner in crime.
“Arsenic & Old Lace” debuted on Broadway in 1939 and enjoyed an incredible run for the comedy genre of onstage entertainment. In its time, the show was an instant “killer” smash, counting over 1,400 performances on the New York stage and abroad. The production eventually closed after winning audiences over and proving that even the macabre can be twisted into laughter. The film treatment of the story was released in 1944 starring Cary Grant, Peter Lorre and other Hollywood stars.
So consider the fate that landed Archer-Gilligan, the reputed protagonist for Kesselring’s story. She was a true villain who spent her remaining days in a very cozy “sanitarium” for the mentally compromised. Is it possible the whole gang in “Arsenic & Old Lace” just might end up like the real-life killer, this time at the nearby Happy Dale institution? Or what they used to call a nuthouse.
But we won’t give away the ending.
