Arsenic & Old Lace at Playhouse 615

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The play is a farcical black comedy revolving around the Brewster family, descended from the Mayflower settlers but now composed of maniacs, most of them homicidal. The hero, Mortimer Brewster (Michael Welch) is a drama critic who must deal with his crazy, murderous family and local police in Brooklyn, New York, as he debates whether to go through with his recent promise to marry the woman he loves, Elaine Harper (MacKenzie Lee) who lives next door and is the daughter of the local minister (Art Elrod).

His family includes two spinster aunts, Abby (Diane Bearden-Enright) and Martha (Ann Street-Kavanagh) Brewster, who have taken to murdering lonely old men by poisoning them with a glass of home-made elderberry wine laced with arsenic, strychnine, and "just a pinch" of cyanide; a brother, Teddy (Bryan Sullivan), who believes he is Theodore Roosevelt and digs locks for the Panama Canal in the cellar of the Brewster home (which then serve as graves for the aunts' victims; he thinks that they died of yellow fever); and a murderous brother, Jonathan (Matt N. Smith), who has received plastic surgery performed by an alcoholic accomplice, Dr. Einstein (also played by Art Elrod) — a character based on real-life gangland surgeon Joseph Moran — to conceal his identity, and now looks like horror-film actor Boris Karloff (a self-referential joke, as the part was originally played on Broadway by Karloff).

Throughout the play, Jonathan is plotting to kill his brother, in fact almost does in one scene. Mortimer is struggling to find solutions to rid his family of the crazy, eventually sending Teddy and his Aunts to a senior living home and letting Officer O'Hara (Kevin Guinn) deal with his brother.

The film adaptation follows the same basic plot, with a few minor changes.

Other cast members include Gary Patterson, Clyde Adams, and Connor Olen.

Directed by Playhouse 615 Artistic Director, Joel Meriwether.