Arsenic & Old lAce - Center Stage

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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 Next Stage: Arsenic & Old Lace | 10
Arsenic and Old Lace: A (Partial) Genealogy of Sorts Zany Domestics You Can’t Take It with You The Man Who Came to Dinner The Addams Family—drawings, cartoon, television show, movies Comic Mysteries Kind Hearts and Coronets The Lavender Hill Mob The Thin Man and its countless sequels The Ladykillers To Catch a Thief Bullets Over Broadway Manhattan Murder Mystery Genre Spoofs Get Smart Clue Sleuth Shear Madness Murder by Death Madcap Macabre Heathers Drop Dead Gorgeous Beetlejuice Delicatessen Six Feet Under Young Frankenstein Fiction & Drama Agatha Christie’s mysteries, especially those featuring Miss Marple Dark Passage The Petrified Forest Key Largo Gaslight Psycho And of course, the Sondheim/Wheeler classic Sweeney Todd is hard to imagine without Arsenic and Old Lace. Joseph Mahowald in Sweeney Todd (2003–04) Next Stage: Arsenic & Old Lace | 11
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Arsenic & Old lAce - Center Stage

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