Arsenic & Old lAce - Center Stage

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Glossary Continued >>> Tearoom in Charleston, South Carolina, adapted from the more common Queen Cake. Others hold that the cake was fictional to begin with, but sounded so delicious that readers clamored to have the recipe, and some creative chef obliged. The popular writer Owen Wister wrote the novel Lady Baltimore in 1906, in which a young man orders the eponymous cake for a wedding. On December 24, 1906, the Daily Gazette and Bulletin of Williamsport, Pennsylvania published the classic recipe. Chopped figs and candied cherries are often added to the frosting as well, and a similar yellow cake is known as the “Lord Baltimore.” Mayor LaGuardia: Fiorello LaGuardia (1882–1947) was the Republican Mayor of New York for three terms from 1934 to 1945. In 1941, FDR appointed him the first director of the Office of Civilian Defense. He was a very popular mayor and a supporter of the New Deal, helping to lead New York out of the Depression. He is recalled today in the name of the airport. Mutt and Jeff: The first successful daily comic strip, it ran from 1907–1982. The strip seems never to have been adapted into a play touring American provincial towns, however: the theater’s loss. Nora Bayes Theatre: The play that Mortimer is reviewing, Murder Will Out, is playing at the Nora Bayes Theatre. Nora (1880–1928) was an extremely popular vaudevillian, singer, and Broadway star. She co-wrote “Shine On, Harvest Moon” with her second husband; sang “Over There,” the World War I song by George M. Cohan; and played in the Ziegfeld Follies. She established her own Manhattan theater in 1918, at 216 W. 44 th Street. The New York Times purchased it in 1940, and it was demolished in 1945 to accommodate the paper’s expansion. The theater was dark for most of 1941, so Kesselring’s fictive play wasn’t actually playing in rep with anything. Panama Canal: One of Teddy Roosevelt’s most noteworthy achievements. Starting in 1904, the Canal was dug across the narrowest strip of Central America, to allow ships to pass from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back without sailing around all of South America. The interest of the United States in the region contributed to the formation of Panama as an independent state: when Colombia refused the payment Roosevelt offered for the right to build the canal, he secretly supported a revolution. Ships started sailing the canal in 1914, and the canal was officially opened in 1921. [see also: Teddy Roosevelt, Culebra Cut, yellow fever] Pirandello: When Mortimer is “feeling a little Pirandello,” he is referring to the work of Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936), an Italian playwright and novelist and the Nobel Laureate of 1934. Pirandello’s work anticipated the absurdist, existential dramas of Beckett, Pinter, and Ionesco. Mortimer is probably referring to Pirandello’s most famous work, Six Characters in Search of an Author, in which the six characters of an uncompleted play invade another rehearsal and demand the chance to play out their lives. These creations rebel against their creator and attack the structure and foundation of the play. This metatheatricality finds an echo in some parts of Arsenic and Old Lace. Six Characters made its New York debut in 1922. Prodigal: Jonathan casts himself as the title character in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, (Luke 15:11–32). It’s a story about a father with two sons: the younger takes his share of the inheritance while Dad is still living, goes far away, and wastes it all on the high life. He returns when the money runs out, and his father welcomes him back with open arms (and a delicious fatted calf). The older brother is jealous, because he’s been a good and faithful son the whole time, and the father responds: “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.” Not quite the response Jonathan’s homecoming elicits from his aunts. Rumble seat: Jonathan and Dr. Einstein have stored poor Mr. Spenalzo in the rumble seat, an exterior upholstered seat opening out from the rear end of the car in place of a trunk. Rumble seats were also known as dickey seats or mother-inlaw seats, and began to be phased out in America in the 1930s. San Juan Hill: In 1898, Teddy Roosevelt went to Cuba at the head of a volunteer regiment known as the “Rough Riders” to fight in the Spanish-American War. He led a death-defying charge against Kettle Hill in the battle that marked the beginning of the end for the Spanish. Other American troops actually captured San Juan Hill on the same day, and it has become the better-remembered hill, forever associated with Roosevelt’s charge. [see also: Teddy Roosevelt] Smelling salts: Mortimer requests smelling salts for Elaine after her encounter with Jonathan. Smelling salts are ammonium carbonate, a whitish crystalline solid. The release Next Stage: Arsenic & Old Lace | 14
Glossary Continued of the ammonia irritates the mucous membranes of the nose, and triggers an inhalation reflex. They are used to arouse people from unconsciousness, and to revive one from a fit of the vapors. Strindberg: Johan August Strindberg (1849–1912) remains, along with Henrik Ibsen, one of the most important Scandinavian writers ever, and one of the fathers of modern theater. His best-known plays include Miss Julie, The Father, A Dream Play, The Dance of Death, and Ghost Sonata. His earlier work is naturalistic, but in a later period he pioneered expressionism in drama. Strindberg confronts class, gender roles, dysfunctional family dynamics, and repressive social mores. Strychnine: Strychnine is commonly used as a rat poison. When ingested by a human, the characteristic symptoms of strychnine convulsion usually appear after 20 minutes. The victim experiences intense pain and fear throughout the convulsions, which last for two minutes and reoccur periodically until the seizures are controlled or the victim dies. Teddy Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (1858–1919), was the 26 th President of the United States, serving for two terms from 1901–1909. Before coming to office after President William McKinley was assassinated, he was a rancher in the Dakota Territory, a hero of the Spanish-American war, and the governor of New York. He was a historian, a lawyer, and a prolific writer; his 35 books ranged in subject from the American frontier to naval history. He was born into a wealthy New York family, but pushed for progressive reforms throughout his political life. As President, Roosevelt spearheaded the construction of the Panama Canal and became known as a “trust buster.” An ardent conservationist, he set aside 194 million acres of land for national parks and wildlife refuges, and urged Congress to establish the United States Forest Service in 1905. Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for brokering the peace treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War. Although his opponents decried him as a cowboy imperialist, his boundless energy, childlike curiosity, and wide-ranging intellectual interests won him many admirers, and he remains one of the most popular presidents in history. The Oregon: The USS Oregon never made it to Australia. She was launched in 1893, and served in the Spanish-American War, setting a record with a historic voyage in 1898. In 66 days, she sailed over 14,000 miles, from San Francisco to Florida, circumnavigating South America. This voyage swept away all opposition to the construction of the Panama Canal, as the Oregon’s journey would have been a mere three weeks if the Canal had already existed. The Oregon continued to serve nobly in the Pacific until she was scheduled to be dismantled for scrap in WWII. However, it turned out that there was plenty of scrap metal to be had without destroying an old war hero, so she was reinstated and used as a munitions barge in the Battle of Guam. Finally, in 1948, she fell apart and drifted off to sea. [see also: Panama Canal, Teddy Roosevelt] Thoreau: Mortimer’s ambitions reach beyond the footlights: he’s writing a book on Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the prolific American transcendentalist author and philosopher best known for Walden and the pamphlet Civil Disobedience. Thoreau wrote over 20 volumes of poetry, essays, books, and journals, dealing with such topics as abolition, ecology and the environment, conscientious objection, and nonviolent resistance. He was part of the literary and philosophical circle that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. True Detective: The original American true crime magazine, founded in 1924, True Detective published both fictional and factual accounts of crime and detective work. The magazine was the home for early Dashiell Hammett (whose detective, Sam Spade, Humphrey Bogart made famous in The Maltese Falcon), and spawned hundreds of imitations. Although beloved by law enforcement (and J. Edgar Hoover, a charter subscriber), the magazine never spurned controversy: the 1931 serial “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,” about Georgia’s brutal penal system, led to prison reform across the nation. Yellow fever: Yellow fever—an acute viral disease that causes high fever, muscle pain, vomiting, shivers, loss of appetite, and, in its toxic phase, jaundice, bleeding from all orifices, and kidney failure—is spread by mosquitoes; this was discovered by a medical team, led by Dr. Walter Reed, during the Spanish- American War. Panama was prone to yellow fever epidemics, which had devastated all attempts to build a canal until Reed’s discoveries were implemented. Still, yellow fever, malaria, and landslides took their toll: as many as 27,500 workers may have died during construction of the Panama Canal. The last major outbreak of the disease in the United States was the 1905 New Orleans epidemic; a vaccine was developed in 1937. [see also: Panama Canal, Teddy Roosevelt] X Next Stage: Arsenic & Old Lace | 15
Page 1 and 2: Next Stage Resource Guide Arsenic &
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Arsenic & Old lAce - Center Stage

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