By Page Laws
Arthur Lazalde, left, as Jonathan Brewster, Steven Minow as Dr. Einstein, and Michael Raver as Mortimer Brewster. (Erica Johnson)
Elaine: “You ought to be fair to these plays.”
Mortimer (the critic): “Are these plays fair to me?” …
Jonathan to Dr. Einstein, his cohort in crime, “This must really be an artistic achievement. After all, we’re performing before a very distinguished critic.”
True, that … though, of course, Jonathan (Arthur Lazalde) and Einstein (Steven Minow) could be referring not to Yours Truly but Jonathan’s estranged critic brother Mortimer (Michael Raver), whom they’ve trussed up to torture to death.
Though generally a shy nocturnal species, we theater critics are inordinately fond of plays and films about other theater critics, e.g., “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” “All About Eve,” and, of course, the old chestnut dark comedy kicking off Virginia Stage Company’s 46th season, Joseph Kesselring’s 1941 “Arsenic and Old Lace.”
Perhaps best known for its 1944 film adaptation starring Cary Grant, the show and film feature a third brother, Teddy, played by local descendent of Samuel Clemens and regular VSC cutup, Ryan Clemens. This Teddy Brewster has taken his Christian name too seriously and assumed the identity of Teddy Roosevelt. That’s a nice way of saying he’s bonkers. (Says Mortimer later in the play, “You see, insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.”)
But the truly disarming Brewsters are the elderly aunts Abby (Actors’ Equity import Linda Slade) and Martha (local talent Kathy Strouse). They have a habit of dispatching elderly gentlemen without families who happen to wander into their Gothic Victorian Brooklyn mansion. (They rent out a room to attract such wanderers.) The old dears consider it a charitable act to serve visitors their recipe: elderberry wine enriched with arsenic, strychnine and “just a pinch of cyanide,” perhaps for body. And that’s precisely what the wine drinker becomes: a dead body.
They then dispose of the corpses in the basement (represented by an upstage door and landing). The only problem is that a fresh corpse, a Mr. Hoskins, is waiting patiently inside the window seat and yet to be disposed of at the play’s start. He’ll soon compete for holding space, courtesy of nephew Jonathan’s ill-tempered shenanigans.
Teddy Brewster (Teddy Roosevelt) generally does his aunts’ burial work, having been told that these are victims of Yellow Fever (a poignant joke for Norfolkians, especially as it coincides with the release of former Virginian-Pilot writer Lon Wagner’s book on the subject.) Teddy believes he’s digging locks for his Panama Canal in the Brewster basement. Actor Clemens has a rather tiresome shtick: repeatedly running upstairs and shouting “Charge!;” blowing a bugle (to the neighbors’ chagrin); and/or disappearing downstairs to “Panama.” Clemens soldiers through with affirmative shouts of “bully!” whenever he’s presidentially pleased.
So let’s review the convention of crazies. The two aunts are friendly homicidal maniacs; Teddy is trapped in his Rooseveltian persona/fantasy; Jonathan has been missing in action from the family for decades, but he, too, is an (unfriendly) homicidal maniac, proud and competitive with his aunts when it comes to his corpse count. (It stands, roughly, at 12 for the aunts and 12 for Jonathan, abetted by Einstein (no relation to Albert).
Einstein sports a (sort of) German accent and a doctor’s bag which he uses to change Jonathan’s appearance before the story begins. Jonathan arrives into the play resembling Boris Karloff. ( Younger playgoers — please consider this unsuitable fare for young children — may need to be informed of who Karloff was, since he played Jonathan on Broadway in 1941 and the play contains multiple references to him.)
In our final tally of the insane Brewsters, it must be emphasized that Mortimer the critic (aside from his dubious profession) is the only sane Brewster. He’s saddled with lengthy double takes of horrified astonishment on learning of his aunts’ depravities. (Even Cary Grant had trouble with these lengthy double takes.) But Mortimer, too, is “crazy in love” with neighbor Elaine Harper (Victoria Alev, another of five Equity leads in the show). There are multiple minor roles filled with VSC local non-Equity stalwarts, such as John Cauthen, (Elaine’s father Rev. Dr. Harper); Ron Newman (Mr. Gibbs, who nearly drinks the elderberry but doesn’t); and Tom O’Reilly (the insane asylum official Mr. Witherspoon). We also have a bevy of Brooklyn cops (Alvan Bolling II, Dan Cimo, Darius Nelson, Scott Rollins) so enamored of the Brewster sisters that they can’t be bothered to check the basement for those silly so-called graves.
Darius Nelson, left, as Officer O’Hara and Michael Raver as Mortimer Brewster. (Erica Johnson)
Something must have “possessed” Tom Quaintance (VSC’s producing artistic director) when he chose this frantic farce, which, we learn from Mo De Poortere’s dramaturgical notes, was based on an early 1900s case, that of Amy Archer-Gilligan who ran the “Archer Home for Aged People and Chronic Invalids” in Windsor, Connecticut and dispatched her residents with arsenic.
Perhaps Quaintance felt depressed by the election season; perhaps he’d had one too many pumpkin-spice lattes; perhaps he was fantasizing about a Tazewell Avenue season of Howl O’Scream (à la Busch Gardens). At any rate, VSC has a season of ghoulish goodies planned: Next comes “Dracula,” albeit a “feminist take” by Kate Hamill (remember her Jane Austen adaptations at VSC?); “A Sherlock Carol” (can you have Sherlock without murder?) will alternate with the traditional offering of “A Merry Little Christmas Carol.” That’s followed by “Fat Ham,” a loose reworking of “Hamlet” that nicely represents more recent American theater; then there’s a final injection of comic horror in the newer chestnut: “Little Shop of Horrors.”
For folks who like a season with thematic unity, here we have one! Boys and girls, start your engines. Or as Teddy Brewster might say, “Charge!”
Page Laws is dean emerita of the Nusbaum Honors College at Norfolk State University. prlaws@aya.yale.edu
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