A Spoonful of Wine Helps The Poison Go Down: Arsenic & Old Lace at Bowie Community Theare
author: Chris Pence
Don’t drink the wine at Bowie Community Theatre! Joseph Kesselring’s 1939 classic black comedy Arsenic & Old Lace follows Mortimer Brewster, a theatre critic who comes home to 1930’s Brooklyn to announce to his beloved Aunts Abby and Martha that he’s engaged to Elaine Harper,
Expectations are the hobgoblins of the complacent mind. Because nonsense is the new sense when Lewis Black is your playwright. Kicking off summer with a comedic offering, Bowie Community Theatre is retro-tripping back to the summer of 1981 with Lewis Black’s One Slight Hitch. Directed by Jennifer L. Franklin, this show has all the potential hallmarks of a farce and might even make you giggle.
The players do well with this script but the show is not without issues and the majority of those issues come from playwright Lewis Black.
In an overzealous, albeit admirable, attempt to commit to producing their previously announced season, The Baltimore Theatre Collective— one of Baltimore’s most recent live-theatre incarnations pre-Global-Covid-19-Pandemic— Artistic Director Tommy Malek alongside four talented area actors set their sights on delivering their production of Stephen Karam’s Speech and Debate. Directed by Tommy Malek and featuring Seth Fallon, Amanda Matousek, Pamela Northrup, and Max Wolf, this show is the mark of a true effort in the “keeping the faith” movement of theatres all across the world whose stages have been darkened by the Covid-19 Pandemic.