Once again, the old warhorse delivers the goods. The Little Theatre of Alexandria is presenting one of the most produced plays of the last half-century, and audiences are eating it up both because the production is solid and the play itself is well-written, well-conceived and, well… funny.
“Arsenic and Old Lace,” written by Joseph Kesselring, was a surprise hit when it first opened on Broadway and ran through most of World War II. It amassed nearly 1,500 performances, more than 30 times longer than its author’s previous longest-running play.
That may have been because the script had been liberally rewritten by the show’s producers, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. Their “Life with Father” was the reigning hit on Broadway at the time, and they later provided the script for “The Sound of Music.” They knew what to do with Kesselring’s original idea: how to streamline its plot and insert the funniest material.
That original idea, as many theatergoers and fans of the Frank Capra movie know, was to tell the story of two doddering old ladies who have, as acts of kindness, been murdering elderly gentlemen with no families of their own. The contrast between the mayhem they have committed and the absolute innocence of their view of their actions is the central joke, but much more inventiveness surrounds the basic conceit.
The ladies live in a world filled with bizarre situations. They share their home with their nephew, who suffers from the delusion that he is Teddy Roosevelt and yells “Charge!” every time he ascends the stairway, under the impression that it is San Juan Hill. Another nephew is a criminal, who has undergone surgery to disguise his features, only to emerge looking like Boris Karloff, Frankenstein’s monster of the movies (in the original play, the part was played by Karloff himself).
Perhaps most bizarre, however, is the career of a third nephew - he’s a theater critic. What’s more, he’s a theater critic who hates theater: As he leaves one evening to attend a play, he borrows a piece of paper from his aunts, saying, “I’ll save time by writing my review on the way to the theater.”
Add a stage-struck beat cop, a clueless detective and the plastic surgeon who created the Karloff monster (he goes by the name “Dr. Einstein,” leading to even stranger assumptions) and you have as colorful a collection of comic characters as could be. It is the contrast between these and the innocent charm of the old ladies that sets the comedy rollicking.
As Mortimer, the theater critic, reels from the realization that his aunts would commit mass murder, he challenges his Aunt Abby’s claim that there are a dozen bodies buried in her basement. She summons all the haughty dignity at her command, demanding, “You don’t suppose I’d tell a fib, do you?”
That aunt is played by Adriana Hardy, and she’s the soul of determined rectitude buttressed by an absolute conviction that serving elderberry wine laced with arsenic (and a pinch of cyanide) to men who have no families is simply no less than Christian charity toward her fellow man. Her partner in these perceived good deeds is the flightier but even more charitable Aunt Martha, played by Carla Scopelitis with just a touch of knowing wink. Together they are quite a pair.
Tim Hattwick is a kind of straight man to the pair, as Mortimer, the nephew who stumbles on the truth of their activities and is in enough touch with reality to realize it is both illegal and wrong.
Kristen Page does nicely with the thoroughly sane and, therefore somewhat less interesting, character of his fiancée. John Kirby goes a bit too far overboard with his evil snarl as Jonathan, the Karloff-esque nephew. Ernie Sult adds a brief but delightful cameo as the gentleman who just may be the last recipient of the aunts’ charitable dispatch.