FOR the third time in its 50-year history, Repertory Philippines presents the macabre comedy Arsenic and Old Lace which revolves around the murder and madness which runs in the Brewster family.
Joseph Kesselring’s 1939 black comedy tells the story of the dysfunctional Brewster family: two sweet and charitable aunts Martha and Abby (played by Jay Valencia Glorioso and Joy Virata), their delusional nephew Teddy (Jeremy Domingo), his murderous brother Jonathan (Apollo Sheikh Abraham), and the youngest of the brothers, Mortimer (Nelsito Gomez).
It turns out that the sweet aunts have a secret: they are responsible for the deaths of lonely old bachelors by serving them elderberry wine laced with arsenic, strychnine, and “a pinch” of cyanide. The murders are “one of our charities,” say the sisters. Meanwhile Teddy, who thinks that he is Theodore Roosevelt, buries the bodies in the cellar thinking that they are yellow fever victims.
The play follows Mortimer, a drama critic whose perfect life is turned upside down when he learns the family secret and must keep his sanity while protecting his fiancée (Barbara Jance) and his family from the police.
The opening night review in The New York Times — the play opened on Jan. 10, 1941 — the play was “so funny that none of us will ever forget it.”
The play was later made into a film starring Cary Grant and directed by Frank Capra.
“It’s funny because these people — who kill people — still find a way to stay and keep it about family. It’s quite interesting. The reasons why they do it is their reason, but it’s so funny how normal things affect them more than murdering people. There’s no moral to this story because these people live in shades of grey. After analyzing the script, ’yan lang ang takeaway ko (that is my only takeaway): they’ve managed to be a family despite their dysfunctional tendency to kill people,” director Jamie Wilson told BusinessWorld.
“The moral takeaway is that family is family,” Mr. Wilson elaborated.
The story does not justify murder, though, “it just happened to be the comedic device of the play,” he said.
In today’s context, he said we essentially “kill people every day, except that it’s not murder.” He gives the Facebook phenomenon as an example, where we unfriend and unfollow people to cut our ties with them. “If you can afford to unfriend someone online, then you’re essentially killing whatever contact you have on them. We do it every day, and so casually,” he said.
At the end of the day, or the play, it all boils down to the kinds of relationships we have.
“Their relationships are intertwined within the family and the people around them, which give the humor, the goodness, and the disaster of the story. They are good representation of a typical Filipino family — with the exception that they don’t kill people. The relationships between them is typical, there are brothers who do not get along, there are the aunties who are very charitable, who make soup for anybody — but they just so happen to kill people,” added Mr. Wilson.
“The moral takeaway is what you come out of it. What you make the audience feel. Sometimes, I do like stories that don’t have a moral story, so you’re free to makeup your own mind,” he said. — Nickky Faustine P. de Guzman
Arsenic and Old Lace will open on April 6 at Onstage, Greenbelt 1, Ayala Center, Makati City, and run until April 29. Tickets are available at the gate and through TicketWorld.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR