Arsen und Spitzenhäubchen

Abby and Martha Brewster are two charming elderly ladies who are highly regarded in their neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. They are generous and helpful, well-liked, and welcomed everywhere they go. Their tea parties, featuring quince jelly and elderberry wine, are famous. The pastor and the police also enjoy visiting the little house and the two sisters often. Abby and Martha also like to invite elderly guests, to whom they serve their elderberry wine with special care. 

Their peaceful life is disrupted when their nephew Jonathan moves in with them—a wanted mass murderer who also has the dubious Dr. Einstein in tow—and a dead body. Mortimer, the sisters’ other nephew—Jonathan’s brother and the family’s ray of sunshine—goes on high alert. He is a theater critic and thus accustomed to outlandish stories. But what he now experiences at his aunts’ house surpasses anything he has ever seen before. It turns out there are more bodies—and they turn up regularly. Eventually, Mortimer realizes his aunts are deeply involved in all of this. Mortimer does everything in his power to keep them from being arrested and to save his own engagement to the pastor’s daughter. No easy feat in this crazy house. After all, there’s also his other brother, Teddy, who thinks he’s the President of the United States… 

“Arsenic and Old Lace” by Joseph Kesselring has been eliciting countless laughs and delighting audiences since 1941, whether on stage or through the famous film adaptation starring Cary Grant. The Brewster sisters—and this crime comedy along with them—have long since achieved cult status.