<P> The play was directed by Bretaigne Windust, and opened on Broadway at the Fulton Theatre on January 10, 1941 . On September 25, 1943, the play moved to the Hudson Theatre . It closed there on June 17, 1944, having played 1,444 performances . </P> <P> Of the twelve plays written by Kesselring, Arsenic and Old Lace was the most successful, and, according to the opening night review in The New York Times, the play was "so funny that none of us will ever forget it ." </P> <P> The play is a farcical black comedy revolving around the Brewster family, descended from the Mayflower, but now composed of insane homicidal maniacs . The hero, Mortimer Brewster, is a 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 his recent promise to marry the woman he loves . </P> <P> 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, strychnine, and "just a pinch" of cyanide; a brother who believes he is Theodore Roosevelt and digs locks for the Panama Canal in the cellar of the Brewster home (which then serve as graves for the aunts' victims; he thinks that they died of yellow fever); and a murderous brother who has received plastic surgery performed by an alcoholic accomplice, Dr. Einstein (a character based on real - life gangland surgeon Joseph Moran) to conceal his identity, and now looks like horror - film actor Boris Karloff (a self - referential joke, as the part was originally played on Broadway by Karloff). </P>

How many characters in arsenic and old lace