Arsenic & Old lAce - Center Stage

y Gavin Witt,
Production Dramaturg
“When are playwrights going
to use some imagination?”
—Mortimer Brewster, Arsenic and Old Lace
In Arsenic and Old Lace, Kesselring
(with his collaborators, Lindsay
and Crouse) created a potent
combination—and not just the wicked
Brewster Brew. At once whimsical spoof
and transcendent manifestation of its
genre, his morbid mystery has since
its debut won over legions of critics
and audiences alike with its distinctive
blend of the madcap and the macabre.
Kesselring drew from a range of
influences, and in doing so blazed a new
trail for other works and writers to come,
in as diverse an array of styles and forms
as one could imagine.
In his career-making play, Kesselring
blithely mixed the foundations of farce
and screwball comedy from Feydeau to
Kaufman and Hart—full of rapid-fire
entrances and exits, and the inevitable
untimely entrance of the inopportune
visitor—with the spooky features of
the pulp detective tales then popular
in dime novels, radio serials, true crime
magazines, and film. He reached back,
too, to Gothic horror fiction: shuddering
tales of dark old houses hiding terrible
secrets as told by Edgar Allen Poe and
Sheridan La Fanu, or as in more recent
favorites like Daphne du Maurier’s 1938
chiller, Rebecca. Hardboiled detectives
and the true crime craze he wove in
through the addition of Jonathan,
Einstein, and the local constabulary
(who at times may also owe a debt to
the Keystone Kops). On stage meantime,
within weeks of Arsenic’s opening on
Broadway there were almost half-adozen
mysteries, thrillers, and ghost
tales also playing; a mere hint of how
popular these horror tales became as
America geared up for the real-world
horrors of World War II.
In most cases, however, these chiefly
forgettable and now-forgotten efforts
took themselves very seriously. The
rare exceptions tended to be tales of
suave and aristocratic sleuths. Most
notable among these were Nick and
Nora Charles in the Thin Man series
created by Dashiell Hammett (who also
provided the hardboiled hero Sam Spade,
memorably played by Humphrey Bogart
in the film The Maltese Falcon, released
the same year Arsenic premiered). It is in
this last, more tongue-in-cheek direction
that Arsenic made its mark, creating a
literary nexus that would spawn a host
of plays and films from the cheerfully
ghoulish to the mysteriously manic. X
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