Muderously Funny Elderly siblings poison guests in comedy classic ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’

If you’re snobbish enough to think that “Arsenic and Old Lace,” one of the old comedy nuggets, is a yawner, take a lesson from Julie Arnold Lisnet. When the Bangor theater teacher and co-founder of Ten Bucks Theater in Brewer found out that Joseph Kesselring’s 1941 comedy was the nonmusical theatrical offering this month at The Grand Auditorium in Ellsworth, she snarled and rolled her eyes. The show, she thought, warranted a great big “ugh.”

“Everybody knows it. Everybody does it,” said Lisnet, who is also an actor. “I saw it years ago at the University of Maine, and I liked it, and I laughed. But it’s the play that’s done at every Tom, Dick and Harry theater.”

Then Robert Libbey, the executive director at The Grand, asked Lisnet to direct the show, which opens tomorrow and runs through March 27. That forced Lisnet to read the play. And here’s where the lesson comes in.

“I’m a complete convert,” she said last weekend during a rehearsal in Ellsworth. “It’s a damn hard play, and I’m having the time of my life.”

“Arsenic and Old Lace” is part comedy, part suspense, part murder mystery, part cartoon. Central to the play are the elderly Brewster sisters whose favorite pastime is feeding poisonous elderberry wine to lonely old men and burying them in the cellar. When their drama critic nephew finds out about their deadly habits, he learns that they do it as a favor to the old guys, to put them out of their melancholic misery. It never dawned on them that there might be legal or moral implications to their acts.

Mixed into the plot are the sisters’ two brothers, one who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt and another who is a serial killer of a different sort. In the end, it’s a wacky family reunion.

The sisters are based on Amy Duggan Archer Gilligan, a real-life woman who ran a home for the elderly in the early 20th century. Most of her clients were men who were terminally ill, and she offered them lifetime care if they signed over their insurance policies to her. More than two dozen men died from arsenic poisoning while in her care. Eventually, she was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to be hanged. Through a technicality, the verdict was changed, and Gilligan ended up with a life sentence. She died in 1962.

The Kesselring version of Gilligan’s exploits became one of the most popular shows of its day, eventually being made into a Frank Capra movie starring Cary Grant as the nephew. The play was also revived on Broadway in the 1980s, and has become a favorite among regional and community theaters.

“People love it. It’s a classic. So why not do it?” said Libbey. “The characters still work.”

Lisnet agreed.

“I had it in my head that this would be a bore,” she said. “It’s not. I’ve had to revamp my sense of the old stuff. And I’ve learned through this not to dismiss them as quickly. That’s what was so surprising to me. I thought I was beyond this type of play. I’m not. You can’t forget theater history. I can’t say with surety that 500 years from now people will be doing ‘Arsenic and Old Lace.’ But maybe they will. It has the stuff of great comedy.”

Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.

?Arsenic and Old Lace?

Where: The Grand Auditorium, Ellsworth

When: 7 p.m. March 18-19, 2 p.m. March 20, 7 p.m. March 25-26 and 2 p.m. March 27

Tickets: $18 adults, $16 seniors and $10 children

Contact: 667-9500 or www.grandonline.org