Review: Arsenic and Old Lace by Wimberley Players
by Michael Meigs
Joseph Kesselring's 1941 play Arsenic and Old Lace is a "golden oldie" kept alive for American culture by Frank Capra's 1944 film with Cary Grant and by community theatre productions such as the charming one currently at the playhouse in Wimberley.
Theatre critic Mortimer Brewster has been brought up his maiden aunts Abby and Martha, and one wonders how he escaped noticing the fact that they're nuttier than fruitcakes. Mortimer's brother Teddy stalks about the place, throughly convinced that he's President Teddy Roosevelt.
Just as romance is blossoming for the drama critic (who despises the theatre), he discovers that his sweet aunts have been cheerfully poisoning lonely old men and encouraging Teddy to bury them in the cellar as victims of yellow fever at the Panama Canal. Mortimer just might be able to resolve those problems if he could get all three members of his deranged family shuttled off to the Happydale Asylum, but another complication turns up: his long-lost second brother, the homicidal Jonathan, accompanied by a plastic surgeon of questionable ethics and not much talent.
The comedy of the piece springs from the juxtaposition of the thoroughly normal -- doting spinster aunts in their tidy frame house in Brooklyn -- with the deranged and the depraved, creating a bubbling pot that Derek Smootz as the reasonable, rational male lead must keep contained. It's most inconvenient to find unexpected corpses in the window seat and in the trunk of bad brother Jonathan's automobile. All that while trying to keep his increasingly bewildered and annoyed fiancée Elaine (Celeste Coburn) uninformed and out of the way.
It all works because Judith Laird and Ellen Massey as the Brewster sisters are thoroughly sympathetic and believable. They're giddy as schoolgirls and kind-hearted as Kris Kringle, nicely matched in attitude and deftly cast as physical opposites: Laird is thin and twittery, Massey is shorter and sweetly rounded, just the sort of darling who would be given to baking cherry pies. A hint to visitors, however -- decline their elderberry wine!The makeup crew does a better job for the production than for the poster photo. Onstage, Laird appears to be using her own hair, nicely coiffed and colored, rather than the tangled white wig shown on the poster.
The Wimberley Playhouse has provided a beautifully detailed box set for this production, designed by Pennye Graves and executed by scenic artists Janis Brown and Carol Dolezal.
Derek Smootz is smooth as Mortimer the protagonist, though at a couple of points he overplays his reactions to appalling circumstances. For example, once he's learned of the aunts' latest act of homicidal kindness, he sinks, overcome, onto the window seat and then springs up again in alarm. That action elicited a laugh, but it would have be a more satisfying one if we'd been able to observe the split second in which he realized that a corpse was tucked tidily beneath him.
Officers Brophy and Klein, the NYPD flatfoots who like to look in from time to time on Miss Abby and Miss Martha, have more of Boerne or Beaumont than Brooklyn about them, but Leo Butler and Terry Robinson are sympathetic, nevertheless. In fact, there's no particular reason to keep the Brooklyn setting other than, perhaps, the proximity to a big city newspaper to employ Jonathan. In contrast, Bill Claussen as the theatre-smitten Officer O'Hara has the prolix charm of the Irish with an insistence and a lilt that convince. Mike Messinger as brother Teddy has presence and a seriously throughtful demeanor that make his Roosevelt delusion that much more comic.
Carl Galante, a welcome and well-known character actor in the region, plays the wicked and menacing brother Jonathan. Accompanying him is Guy Ben-Moshe as his tippling physician sidekick Dr. Einstein, a superbly presented tangle of nerves. The text has the doc repeatedly apologizing for the error of his most recent face lift, which gave Jonathan a mug like that of Boris Karloff. That was a howler in the original Broadway production, for in fact Karloff himself acted the role. Here and now, it's less effective; director Tysha Calhoun might have chosen a more familiar figure who shares Galante's powerful ample physique and rounded Italian features -- Tony Soprano? -- or perhaps she could have elected an in-joke, with the characters comparing Jonathan to Carl Galante.
In any case, Galante and Ben-Moshe are a good Laurel-and-Hardy combination of ne'er-do-wells. My favorite moment in the play came when the jig appeared to be up; Ben-Moshe stepped forward, extending his hands to be handcuffed and instead received a hearty handshake from the droll, diminutive Marvin Carson as the thick headed Lt. Rooney of the police.
Arsenic and Old Lace is unlikely to go out of style, even it's likely that most of the extant copies of it reside in public libraries in the compendia of American drama earnestly edited through the twentieth century by John Gassner and Stanely Richards. So by all means, go enjoy its quirky non-toxic humor!
EXTRA
Click to view excerpts from the Wimberley Players' program for Arsenic and Old Lace
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Arsenic and Old Lace
by Joseph Kesselring
Wimberley Players
September 22 - October 06, 2011
