Arsenic and Old Lace The play opens in an old Brooklyn house in the 1940s. The owners of the house, Martha and Abby Brewster, are running an Inn. Their neighbor, Dr. Harper the Reverend, has stopped by to discuss his daughter Elaine. Martha and Abby's nephew, Mortimer, has fallen in love with Elaine. Being that Dr. Harper is a Revernd he is cautious about who he lets into his daughter's life. But being the cunning ladys that they are, they reassure him that their nephew is a great young man. Later, when Mortimer comes over to his aunt's house, he proposes to Elaine when she arrives. That night, they were scheduled to go to the theater, but while Elaine goes to her house to speak to her father, Mortimer discovers something shocking at his aunt's home; there is a dead man in the window seat. Mortimer believes his brother, who lives at the Inn with their aunts, was the murderer. His brother, Teddy, thinks he is Teddy Roosevelt, so Mortimer concludes his brother is now unstable. When he tells his aunts what he has found, the aunts already know about it. At this moment, Mortimer is very confused at their answer. They admit to being the one to kill the man, but they don't seem to have any sympathy for what they did. They go on and say they have killed 11 other men all for the same reason: lonliness. When a man comes into their inn that is all alone and without family, they put arsenic in their wine to put the men out of their misery. They then tell Teddy the men are yellow fever victims and he buries them in the cellar, where he is digging the Panama Canal. This revelation is more than surprising to Mortimer. When Elaine gets back from her dad's, Mortimer calls off going to the theater and he kicks her out of his aunt's home. Mortimer then decides to meet his attorney at the theater, so he warns his aunts to not let anyone in while he is gone. While he is away, a car pulls up to their home and the aunts hide. Two men walk into the home and the women confront them. One of the men turns out to be their nephew Jonathan and his plastic surgeon, Dr. Einstein. He looks so different it was hard for even them to recognize him. They allow him to stay at the inn and he wanted to make his room into an operating room to make money. We later find out that Jonathan has killed a man and he is in their car right now. Dr. Einstein goes into the cellar with Teddy and discovers the hole where the aunts were going to put the man in the window seat, but he believes it is for the man Jonathon killed. Jonathan then tells the women they should go to bed so that he can sneak the body into the house. But the women also planned to sneak their man's body into the cellar for a funeral service before they bury him. When the lights go out, Teddy takes the body from window seat and puts it into the cellar, and Jonathan hides their body in the window seat. While this is all happening, Elaine enters the women's house because she believes there is an intruder. Jonathan sees her and tries to keep her quiet but Martha and Abby come out of their bedroom dressed in funeral clothes and Mortimer has just gotten home. Mortimer still believes the man his aunts killed is in the window seat so he offers to sleep downstairs and Mortimer can sleep in his room. He then opens it up and realizes it is another man. He once again kicks Elaine out and goes to confront his aunts. Mortimer accuses his aunts of killing another man and shows them the body in the window seat. They have never seen that man before and don't know how he got in