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Line 27: The play is a [[farce|farcical]] [[black comedy]] revolving around the Brewster family, descended from ''[[Mayflower]]'' settlers but 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, 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, Teddy, who believes he is [[Theodore Roosevelt]] and digs [[Lock (water navigation)|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, Jonathan, who has received [[plastic surgery]] performed by an alcoholic accomplice, Dr. Einstein (a character based on real-life gangland surgeon [[Joseph P. Moran|Joseph Moran]]) to conceal his identity, and now looks like horror-film actor [[Boris Karloff]] (a [[self-reference|self-referential]] joke Throughout the play, Jonathan is plotting to kill his brother, in fact almost does in one scene. Mortimer is struggling to find solutions to rid his family of the crazy, eventually sending Teddy and his Aunts to a senior living home and letting Officer O'Hara deal with his brother. | |||