Arsenic and Old Lace

ow calling all sweet, homicidal spinsters (or at least those who have dreamed of being one on stage): The Town Hall Players of Stockbridge are having auditions for their production of the classic black comedy "Arsenic and Old Lace." No experience making elderberry wine required.

You won't want to dawdle, though. Auditions are 6 to 8 p.m. today and tomorrow at the historic Stockbridge Town Hall at the corner of Clinton and Main streets in downtown Stockbridge.

Those auditioning will be asked to read from the script. They are looking for a total of 14 adults — 11 men and three women. Performance dates are February 28 and 29 and March 1, 6, 7 and 8



A synopsis (just in case you have somehow avoided this community theater staple and the classic 1944 film) is after the jump.

The play is a farcical black comedy revolving around Mortimer Brewster, a theatre-hating drama critic who must deal with his crazy, homicidal family and local police in Brooklyn, New York, 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 Teddy Roosevelt and digs locks for the Panama Canal in the cellar of the Brewster home (which then serve as graves for the aunts' victims); 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 by Karloff). The film adaptation follows the same basic plot, with a few minor changes. It is customary, after the cast takes several curtain calls, for the final one to finish with the "murder victims" (often well-known local personalities) entering from the basement and joining the cast for the final bow.