[1] The West End production – directed by Marcel Varnel and produced at London's Strand Theatre – enjoyed a similarly long run.

"[4] The play is a farcical black comedy revolving around the Brewster family, descended from Mayflower settlers but now composed of maniacs, most of them homicidal.

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 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 Moran) to conceal his identity, and now looks like horror-film actor Boris Karloff (a self-referential joke.

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.

The "murderous old lady" plot line may also have been inspired by actual events that occurred in a house on Prospect St in Windsor, Connecticut, where a woman, Amy Archer-Gilligan, took in boarders, promising "lifetime care," and poisoned them for their pensions.

M. William Phelps book The Devil's Rooming House (2010) tells the story of the police officers and reporters from the Hartford Courant who solved the case.

[7] In parallel with the main Broadway run (January 10, 1941 – June 17, 1944), a series of national roadshows took place, the first one in 1941–1942 which travelled to 57 cities in about 18 months,[8]: 134  opening in Chicago on April 1, 1941.

Peter Lorre and Edward Everett Horton repeated their roles as Dr. Einstein and Mr. Witherspoon, which they had played in Frank Capra's film version.

In 1969, Robert Scheerer directed a TV version with Helen Hayes and Lillian Gish as the elderly aunts, Bob Crane as Mortimer, Fred Gwynne as Jonathan, Sue Lyon as Elaine Harper and David Wayne as Teddy.

A Broadway revival of the play ran from June 26, 1986, to January 3, 1987, at the 46th Street Theatre in New York, starring Polly Holliday, Jean Stapleton, Tony Roberts and Abe Vigoda.