Aurora Community Theatre

The play is a farcical, black comedy revolving around the Brewster Family. They descended from the Mayflower settlers but are now composed of maniacs, most of them homicidal. The hero, Mortimer Brewster, is a drama critic who must deal with his crazy, murderous 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; Elaine Harper, who lives next door and is the daughter of the local minister.

His family includes two spinster aunts, Abby and Martha Brewster. They have taken to murdering lonely old men by poisoning them with a glass of homemade elderberry wine laced with arsenic, strychnine and a “pinch” of cyanide. A brother, Teddy, who believes he is Theodore Roosevelt, digs locks for the Panama Canal in the cellar of the Brewster home; which then serve as graves for the aunts’ victims. A murderous brother, Jonathan, who has received plastic surgery performed by an alchoholic accomplice, Dr. Einstein (a character based on real-life gangland surgeon Joseph Moran). To conceal Jonathan’s identity, he now looks like a horror-film actor Boris Karloff (a self referential joke, as the part was originally played on Broadway by Karloff!)