by M. William Phelps

In the play Arsenic and Old Lace, two women, living under that “harmless little old lady” persona, offering seniors a cozy place to room and board, use elderberry wine and arsenic to commit murder. The play, written by Joseph Kesselring, is billed by the Connecticut Theatre Group as “a delightful evening of murder and mayhem with eccentric aunts, crazy nephews and bodies in the basement!” The Ivoryton Playhouse, on Main Street in Ivoryton, CT, is performing Arsenic and Old Lace June 9 through the 27 of this year. We’re working out the details now, but I will be attending a performance on June 24 to sign copies of my book, The Devil’s Rooming House, and talk about how Kesselring wrote the play based on the true story of prolific female serial killer Amy Archer-Gilligan, the subject of my book.

The play has been performed somewhere on the planet for the past seventy-eight years. That’s almost eight decades! It is a popular production high schools and colleges often stage. Frank Capra directed Cary Grant in the hit Hollywood movie version. To say that the Arsenic and Old Lace franchise has been a success is beyond an understatement; the production has generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue all over the world.

What is interesting, beyond the concept of the play itself and the differences between the plot and characters and Amy Archer’s life, is the idea that murder is a form of humorous entertainment. These two old women in the production murder men—and seem to enjoy making a comedy of it. There are plenty of belly laughs and gags to keep us in stitches throughout.

As I have been out on the road talking up my book, the idea of murder as a comical form of entertainment has come up time and again. Amy Archer killed no fewer than 50 people. There’s nothing amusing about that. Those deaths—by arsenical poisoning—were not fast or without a terrible bout of acute pain (and fever), projectile vomiting, nausea, explosive diarrhea, dehydration, and slow death. There’s even some indication that while her victims were dying, Amy taunted and ridiculed them—that is, before taking their money.

So the question, then, becomes: How does one sit and enjoy a production glamorizing and trivializing murder? Some of us in the business of writing true-crime books are continuously dodging jabs from certain opponents who want to minimize what we do, call it exploitation, and say we are making a profit at the expense of murder victims and their families. Many don’t see the journalism. Or understand how hard the work is.

That said, how is it that Kesselring got away with this? How did his play, which opened to favorable reviews and large audiences, get around the idea of murder as entertainment?

Kesselring made several changes, for one, after he was told he did not have permission to use Amy’s story. Amy, lest we forget, lived until the late 1960s, so she was alive for many years while a play about her life was staged around the world. Kesselring did not want to get sued. Audiences, of course, did not know they were watching a play based on a true story. In that sense, they were duped. After all, who in their right mind would write a comedy on an actual murder case?

The play is centered around two elderly women, the madcap, zany, sadistic Brewster sisters. In the real story there was only one woman in her late thirties. Amy was not, as many might presume, an old woman when she committed the murders. The original title of Kesselring’s play was “Bodies in the Cellar,” simply because his femme fatales buried their victims in the cellar of their home. Amy never buried anyone in the cellar of her Windsor, CT, home; she had the undertaker come in the middle of the night and whisk the bodies away after the in-house doctor signed off on a “natural” cause of death. Teddy Brewster, the “crazy” nephew in the production who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt, is based on a real person—Amy’s brother. There are many more of these similarities. But the impetus of each scene and each character is from some part of Amy Archer’s dark reality.

I have learned a lot from the discussions about murder as entertainment we’ve had along the course of my book tour. What I have been saying, to put it briefly, is, if critics of true-crime out there really want to complain to someone about murder being a form of entertainment, please, I beg of you, write to Nancy Grace. Nancy has—along with other like her—turned exploiting murder into a cottage industry, and she thinks she’s doing the world a service, to boot!

My point is, there is truth, disguised of course through the use of trickery and gimmickry, behind most of the popular stories we think are totally fictitious (ahem … “Law & Order”). All stories are based in truth. It’s that fine line between fact and fiction—entertainment shows camouflaged as hard news—that blur things and confuse some of us. When you watch Arsenic and Old Lace, you understand it is a fictitious comedy; the fact that it is based on a true story doesn’t make a difference. But when you watch a show like Nancy Grace, you might be under the impression you are getting news/journalism, and that there are teams of investigative journalists working behind the scenes. Amy Archer was tried and convicted. Her case was closed years before the play hit. How many “alleged” criminals has Nancy Grace and her posse made viewers believe are guilty—for the most part based on the speculation and opinions of her guests? Night after night, Nancy’s guests trash suspects, couching their arguments on that ridiculous word “allegedly.”

Murder as sport, that’s what you get. Commentators and pundits who think they know what the hell it is they’re talking about. Guilty until proven innocent. The new American way.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Matt's Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.