It’s funny how pop culture echoes.
In 1902, Myrtle Reed published a romance novel called Lavender and Old Lace, later filmed as a silent in 1921. In the 1910s, a cocktail called the “Attention Cocktail,” made of gin, crème de violette, dry vermouth and absinthe* started gaining popularity; it was renamed to “Arsenic and Old Lace” in 1941, the same year as the debut of Joseph Kesselring’s play of the same name. (The first film adaptation of that would come in 1944; a much shorter wait.) It’s not clear which came first, though it’s very likely whichever did was riffing off the novel. Or perhaps both of them were, independently.
In September 2003, in the pages of Marvel Comics’ Runaways, a teenage girl names herself “Arsenic” and dubs her genetically modified dinosaur protector* “Old Lace.”
And so, like the Senator Claghorn parodies in Looney Tunes cartoons, pop culture continues to build on the past, bending, shaping and revising to its will plots, themes, and clever turns of phrase.
Honestly, I’m not actually sure Lavender and Old Lace had a damn thing to do with the naming of Kesselring’s play, aside from the fact that the name sounded catchy, but it does signify Arsenic’s irreverence that that it parodied a title that once framed a sincere tale of love, loss and missed connections in a farce whose happy ending is centered on the lead character learning he was secretly adopted.**
Arsenic and Old Lace is screwball from top to bottom, with a plot that piles on increasingly absurd situations and multiple homicides. It starts, as any good screwball does, with a fairly simple, relatable premise: Young Mortimer Brewster, a man who laughed at marriage as an outdated cliché has fallen in love with the girl next door, and they plan to marry — if only the rest of the plot won’t get in the way.
Mortimer’s family is of stalwart New England stock, descendants of the mighty Mayflower, and deeply proud of their heritage. They’re also quite indisputably insane. Mortimer’s brother Teddy is stark raving mad (harmless), his brother Jonathan is stark raving mad (homicidal), and his dear, sweet aunts Martha and Abby — the stable foundation of Mortimer’s upbringing — have been quietly murdering bachelors for years with poisoned elderberry wine. They get Teddy, who thinks he’s Theodore Roosevelt, to do the burials in the basement, which he’s convinced is Panama. All you have to do is tell Teddy that he’s got another victim of yellow fever to take care of, and it all works out quite nicely.
Mortimer barely has time to come to terms with the discovery that his aunts are serial killers and his kindhearted brother their unwilling accomplice before his other, long-lost brother Jonathan shows up again. Jonathan is on the run from the law for his own list of crimes; he tried to hide his identity with plastic surgery, but it went awry, and now Jonathan is cursed with the face of Boris Karloff.*** Just like Mortimer, he’d never learned about his aunts’ poisonous hobby, so he thinks their ancestral home is a perfectly safe place to hide out. After all, they’re old and frail, Teddy is stark raving mad (harmless), and Mortimer was always afraid of him. (With good reason.) Jonathan has dragged his ineffectual plastic surgeon with him, hoping a second round under the knife — with the doctor sober this time — will do the trick. Now Mortimer has to avoid scandal, try to keep his beloved aunts from dying in prison, and save everyone from his monstrous brother, all the while worrying that genetics will turn him into a ticking time bomb.
Nothing goes according to plan, of course: not Jonathan’s, not the aunts’, and certainly not Mortimer’s. This isn’t the kind of farce where someone secretly knows what’s going on the whole time. This is the kind of farce where misunderstandings and mistaken assumptions pile on top of one another, alongside a corpse or two (usually stored in the living room window seat for convenience, until they’re taken to the basement). By the end of the play, Mortimer has managed to keep enough plates spinning in the air to save his own skin, protect his fiancée, keep his aunts out of jail and send his murderous brother to jail — he even manages to keep the bachelors of Boston safe.**** Mostly safe. Probably safe. After the curtain falls, who can tell?
Even on the page, Arsenic and Old Lace shines. The whole thing moves at breakneck speed, which helps prevent things like “logic” and “common sense” from occurring to either the viewer or our hapless hero (and in Mortimer’s defense, “My dear maiden aunts have been secret serial killers for quite some time” is, at best, a hard thing to explain to even the friendliest neighborhood police officer). Mortimer is on the crest of a wave he can’t control and can barely ride, and his panic, frustration, and resilience puts the audience on his side, even if they can’t help but laugh as his plans go sideways over and over again.
On the stage, or in the classic film adaptation starring Cary Grant, the laughs come early and keep building. Probably the key to Arsenic’s success is Jonathan; in contrast to the macabre, almost Addams Family feel of Mortimer’s sweet killer aunts and the gung-ho enthusiasm of poor deluded Teddy, Jonathan is a genuine monster. The play generally keeps a light touch on him and his crimes, but a few moments shade toward genuine horror, including the times he threatens Mortimer’s resolute, charming fiancée Elaine and the one time he hints at the “games” he used to play when he and Mortimer were children: his reference to “the needles under your fingernails” is the kind of uncomfortable detail that tells the audience that Jonathan’s fun and games are only fun for one person. While in lesser hands this might work against Arsenic’s tonal balance, there’s always a punchline around the corner, and the acid in Jonathan’s soul helps give the plot some grounding. The genuine danger that Jonathan represents adds narrative weight and tension to the story and a clear villain to root against. In terms of craft, it also gives Mortimer a chance to act, rather than be acted on, an important note of agency in a play as intensely plotted as this one. He gets a chance to play the hero and save his flawed but beloved family, and he takes it. Victory is as sweet as elderberry wine, and hopefully not as fatal. (There’s also a nice little runner about the power of tradition and appeal to Good Old New England Values: there’s that Mayflower heritage, and Martha and Abby’s victims wax nostalgic over the old-fashioned wine they offer.)
Cary Grant was disappointed in his performance in the film adaptation, but for us mere mortals, it’s a lot of fun. (He’s almost certainly better in the role than the original choice, Bob Hope, would have been; Grant could effectively fake humility.) Grant always insisted that Allyn Joslyn, who originated Mortimer, was better in the part than he was, and I admit I’d love to be able to judge for myself. Josephine Hull (Abby), Jean Adair (Martha) and John Alexander (Teddy) all got to reprise their roles from the Broadway production, and you can tell how beautifully they played off one another on stage.
A lot of the work from the earlier Years of the Month gets forgotten or mostly thought of in nostalgic terms; Arsenic and Old Lace has been saved from that fate so far, I think, though it’s certainly flirting with deep cut status. Hopefully people will keep it alive, even if it’s just by naming genetically altered dinosaurs after the movie named after the play, possibly named after the cocktail parodying the book. (Or maybe the other way around.)
Drink up!
* I mean, that would get my attention.
** “It was a different time” is generally a copout but also, yes, it was, and honestly if we were to list everything “problematic” in the script we’d not only be here all day, we’d also be very bored. This is a play that has to be taken on its own terms or not at all.
*** Karloff himself played Jonathan in the original production, but couldn’t leave to film the adaptation; he was the biggest name in the Broadway cast, and they were afraid ticket sales would crater without him. Since he was one of the play’s producers, this seems like the sensible thing to do.
*** All right, technically they probably do manage to commit one tiny little bonus murder at the end. Technically. But Mortimer and Elaine are okay! And you wouldn’t want Jonathan to hold that record, now would you?
