Arsenic & Old lAce - Center Stage

Compiled by Kathryn Van Winkle, The Mike & Beth Falcone Dramaturgy
Transformation
Aunt Abby and Aunt Martha grew up
in an independent Brooklyn yet to
be incorporated with Manhattan.
Theirs was a neighborhood
of prim houses and Gothic
churches built in the
early 19 th Century:
Walt Whitman’s
“City of Homes and
Churches.” By 1941, their
snug enclave of Yankee
respectability and aristocratic
charity had nearly succumbed
to the encroachment of greater
Brooklyn and its riotous hustleand-bustle
of immigrant families,
bohemian artists, and the notorious
crime families that easily beat the
Brewsters’ collective homicide
record.
Timeline
Brooklyn, 1939–1941
Population: 2,968,285
1939: In the first-ever televised major
league game, the Brooklyn
Dodgers lose to the Cardinals at
Ebbets Field.
1940: The house at 7 Middagh Street in
Brooklyn Heights becomes a salon
for artistic luminaries including
Carson McCullers, W.H. Auden,
Paul and Sally Bowles, Richard
Wright, Oliver Smith, Aaron
Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Marc
Blitzstein, Anaïs Nin, Gypsy Rose
Lee, and Salvador Dalí.
1941: Coney Island Jump 1: Mobster Abe
“Kid Twist” Reles rats out Murder
Inc., then dies in a “fall” from a
Half-Moon Hotel window.
Coney Island Jump 2: The
Parachute Jump from the 1939
New York World’s Fair becomes a
crowd favorite.
Taunts
“…just before World War II…a Brooklynite
named Sid Ascher and some friends
formed the Society for the Prevention of
Disparaging Remarks Against Brooklyn
as a gag. But by 1946 it claimed forty
thousand members who, during that
year alone, tallied three thousand
slanders of Brooklyn in the media.”
—Elliot Willensky, When Brooklyn Was
the World, 1920–1957
“I was born in Brooklyn.”
“What part?”
“All of me.”
A cabbie has the ball game on the radio
when a passenger gets in.
Passenger: How’re the Dodgers doing?
Cabbie: They got three men on base.
Passenger: Which base?
Army doctor: Where are you from, son?
Recruit: Brooklyn.
Doc: Any other defects?
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