The first time I saw Arsenic and Old Lace on stage — that is, live, in a theater, among paying adults — the actors were all famous from television. Some savvy Broadway producer got the idea to put TV stars of the 1960s and 1970s in front of audiences in the late 1980s. And what a treat that was for a generation that had grown up on sitcoms, cop shows and soap operas.
Jean Stapleton (Edith Bunker of “All In The Family”) and Marion Ross (Richie Cunningham’s mom in “Happy Days”) played the crazy Brewster sisters; James MacArthur (Danno from “Hawaii Five-O”) played their nephew, Mortimer; Larry Storch (Corporal Agarn from “F Troop”) played Dr. Einstein; and Jonathan Frid (Barnabas Collins from “Dark Shadows”) played the creepy, Karloff-like Jonathan Brewster.
The play had been on Broadway — with Abe Vigoda (Fish from “Barney Miller”) as Jonathan — and then went on tour with the replacement cast I just mentioned, landing at the bygone Morris A. Mechanic Theatre in Baltimore in November 1987.
It was an excellent production of a dark comedy that has lasted through generations as a staple of professional and community theaters and high school drama clubs. Since its first long Broadway run in 1941, the Joseph Kesselring play about the homicidal Brewster family had been chosen countless times for senior class plays at high schools from sea to shining sea.
Arsenic was adapted for film in 1944, with Frank Capra directing Cary Grant’s Mortimer and Raymond Massey’s Jonathan. I watched it again recently and it’s still very funny, with Mortimer’s aunts (played by Josephine Hull and Jean Adair) accumulating bodies in the basement and Mortimer’s crazy brother Teddy believing that he’s President Theodore Roosevelt. James Gleason shows up as Rooney, the police lieutenant who sorts out almost everything at the end.
By now, Arsenic has been produced thousands of times — Internet searches failed to produce an exact number — and new generations continue to embrace it. The Vagabond Players in Fells Point just added to the play’s production history. Directed by Katie Sheldon, Vagabond’s Arsenic runs through March 15.
Any production of Arsenic pays homage to the playwright — Kesselring, in this case — willing to go over to the dark side and embrace a macabre premise for laughs. It rewards actors for their willingness to drop drama for the challenge — in timing and demeanor — of screwball comedy. (As the British actor Edmund Gwenn put it on his deathbed: “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”) And it rewards audiences willing to suspend modern sensitivities about crime and madness to let farce have its moment.
In the Vagabond production, John Dignam, a veteran actor with numerous roles in local theater, plays Rooney, the character that his late father, also named John, played years ago in a production of Arsenic in Philadelphia. In fact, that run of the play was a true family affair unlike any I’d heard of before.
Three of Dignam’s brothers — Leo, Paul and Tommy — had jobs with Philadelphia Parks & Recreation and became the creators and directors of theatrical programs. “My father was in maybe half a dozen or more of my brothers’ projects during a short span from the mid-1980’s to early-1990’s,” Dignam says. “He took great joy in it.”
In 1992, the brothers did Arsenic and Old Lace at a recreation center in Northwest Philadelphia. John landed the lead role of Mortimer, a character he had played back in high school. The program for that play had Dignam written all over it.
“My brother Tommy directed, Paul played Officer O’Hara, Leo played Teddy Brewster [the Roosevelt character],” John says. “My dad’s identical twin brother, Jim, played one of the cops, my cousin Dominic was the sole stage crew, and my dad played Lt. Rooney.”
That put father and son (Rooney and Mortimer) on stage together for some dialogue, and the son’s memory of those brief moments made it into the eulogy for his father in the summer of 2022.
“In the final act of the play, there was one brief scene where dad and I were the only actors on stage,” John said. “I’m remembering how a couple of live performances of that scene eventually turned into roller-coaster adventures in ad libbing, unintended master classes in improvisation for both of us, as our father would skip a line, forget a line, invent a line.”
But it all worked out. With plays — live, in a theater, among paying adults — it has to.
Dan Rodricks writes weekly for Baltimore Fishbowl. He can be reached via danrodricks.com
