Arsenic and Old Lace

Joseph Kesselring, Directed by Tod Peterson
Commonweal Theater, June 1, 2014

Arsenic and Old Lace is one of those plays that asks the audience to accept a plot driven by coincidences and characters who are over-the-top eccentric. In short, it asks us to suspend what we know of reality to enter into the world the play is creating. While comedy might seem like the most accessible type of theater, both because of our experience with it on television and the seemingly “lightness” of its subject matter, it actually makes great demands upon its audience. By asking us to suspend our sense of reality, to suspend what we know to be true, to suspend how we expect people to act in real life, comedy is asking the ultimate commitment of its audience. In return, a good comedy will reward the audience for accepting happenstance and coincidence for plot. The reward, of course, is the opportunity to laugh, but reward should also include some further engagement, perhaps some insight into the human condition.

A friend of mine once said of a Shakespeare comedy: “it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect the greatest writer in the English Language to include a plot in a work of drama.” While Arsenic and Old Lace has a plot, contrived as it is, the rewards of the play lie elsewhere. And like much of Shakespeare, the rewards for suspending belief are usually worth the trip.

One of the things that makes the Commonweal’s Arsenic and Old Lace worth the trip is the chance to see some great acting. The elderly sisters at the center of the story provide both the lace and the arsenic. Surrounded by Victorian furnishings, Abby and Martha Brewster (played by Patty Mathews and Catherine Glynn), practice a genteel and gracious hospitality that seems to be from a far better past. Mathews and Glynn ooze sweetness: nothing gives them more joy than serving tea to visitors or bringing soup to an ill neighbor. The two actors move together, sharing common gestures and thought patterns that bespeak a lifetime of intimacy. The slow revelation of the arsenic within the lace is delicious, even to the large number in the audience members who clearly have seen this play performed (and laughed freely at the foreshadowing lines).

The audience’s likely familiarity with a play could be a problem: the play can’t rest on its surprise twists of the plot; a successful commonly performed play has to find other ways to engage its audience. The Commonweal’s production really seems to depend on the quality of the acting to bring the play alive. There is nothing out of the ordinary about the production itself, no attempt to make the play “fresh” or modern. The staging looks pretty much like the description Kesselring provides in the play script. If anything, the set is a little less elaborate and a little less Victorian than the playwright describes. This of course is due to the use of a thrust stage rather than the standard proscenium box Kesselring would have been writing for. The play really does stand on the acting. The cast is relatively large, and as we have come to expect at the Commonweal, there is no drop of talent for the smaller roles. Besides the brilliant performances of the Brewster Sisters, the antics of their nephew Teddy prove both enjoyable and historically edifying. (Teddy is played by Nick Ferrucci.) The disfigurement of Jeremy van Meter’s face (playing the prodigal brother-achieved with make-up and extreme facial acting) even gently (or not-so-gently) pokes fun at our own cultural obsession with looking young and the unnaturally rigid faces of our aging rich and famous population.

While not all plays stand up well to repeated performances, Kesselring’s script has certainly held up to repeated viewings (and readings) over the past 75 years. But the best reason to see this play (or see it again, if you’ve seen it before) is to see these characters in the hands of really fine actors. The Commonweal is really strutting its stuff with Arsenic and Old Lace.

Arsenic and Old Lace plays in repertory through September 8.

Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre (www.commonwealtheatre.org)