Joseph Kesselring's macabre farce is set in the Brooklyn home of the sweet, seemingly harmless Brewster sisters, Abby and Martha, who have taken up a peculiar hobby of poisoning lonely elderly bachelors with elderberry wine laced with arsenic, strychnine, and a dash of cyanide, viewing each murder as a genuine act of Christian charity toward friendless old men. Their nephew Mortimer, a drama critic newly engaged to the girl next door, discovers a body hidden in the window seat and is horrified to learn of his aunts' body count, all while trying to keep the scandal from his fiancée and manage his brother Teddy, who believes himself to be Theodore Roosevelt and digs "canal locks" in the basement that conveniently double as graves. The chaos escalates with the arrival of Mortimer's other brother, Jonathan, a genuinely murderous escaped criminal traveling with a sinister plastic surgeon, whose own body count threatens to expose the whole family's homicidal tendencies at once. Kesselring balances gruesome subject matter with breathless farce, mining constant laughs from the gap between the aunts' genteel manners and their casual serial murders. Its enormous original Broadway run and later film adaptation with Cary Grant cemented "Arsenic and Old Lace" as one of the best-loved dark comedies in the American theatrical canon.

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