The play revolves around Mortimer Brewster, a theatre-hating drama critic who must deal with his crazy, homicidal family and local police in Brooklyn, New York, as he debates whether to go through with a honeymoon with the woman he loves and has recently agreed to marry. His family includes two spinster aunts who have taken to murdering lonely old men by poisoning them with a glass of home-made elderberry wine laced with arsenic, cyanide and  "just a pinch" of stychnine; a brother who believes he is Teddy Roosevelt  and digs locks for the Panama Canal in the cellar of the Brewster home (which then serve as graves for the aunts' victims); and a murderous brother who has received plastic surgery  performed by an alalcoholic accomplice, Dr. Einstein to conceal his identity and now looks like horror-film actor Boris Karloff.

Cast