Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2015 07:51:12 -0400
From: Gene Galin
Subject: Woods Charter School presents “Arsenic & Old Lace” tonight at 7:30 pm
Need a little arts and culture tonight?
Come out to Woods Charter School tonight to see a production of “Arsenic & Old Lace.” It starts at 7:30 pm
Woods Charter is at 160 Woodland Grove Ln, Chapel Hill, NC 27516.
Cost? A simple donation is appreciated
*Arsenic and Old Lace* is a play by the American playwright Joseph Kesselring , written in 1939. The play is a farcical black comedy revolving around the Brewster family, descended from the “Mayflower,” but now composed of insane homicidal maniacs. The hero Mortimer Brewster is a drama critic who must deal with his crazy, homicidal family and local police in Brooklyn, NY, as he debates whether to go through with his recent promise to marry the woman he loves. His family includes two spinster aunts 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 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 who has received plastic surgery performed by an alcoholic accomplice, Dr. Einstein (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).