‘Arsenic’ Is Pretty Easy to Swallow : La Habra Depot Theatre’s assured production makes Joseph Kesselring’s black comedy an all-American family affair.

There’s nothing like first impressions to deceive the mind. Take, for instance, the cheery all-American atmosphere surrounding the pretty La Habra Depot Theatre where a crowd of happy parents, kiddies and grandfolks gathered Sunday afternoon for a show. The only thing missing from the Fourth of July atmosphere was fireworks. “Family values” on parade.

Once inside, though, we saw something that, for all its standing as a hoary chestnut, is a sly, black lampoon of those values: Joseph Kesselring’s “Arsenic and Old Lace.”

If this is some subversive joke on the people of La Habra, the audience seemed to be in on it--even when director Robin La Valley’s staging dragged out Kesselring’s already prolonged plot to the point where kids wanted to drag their parents home.

Although many people know “Arsenic” from Frank Capra’s film version, which compressed the play, they may not know the play’s darker tinges--which Capra chose to excise. Here it is, in (almost) full bloom.

The general feel of La Valley’s staging is quite assured for community theater, from Gary White’s old Brooklyn manse set to the velvet pull-down curtain that charmingly requires the actors to freeze the action, tableau-style. And when La Valley’s casting is right, this murderous comedy’s noisy plot machinations are nicely muffled.

When the casting is wrong, you can almost understand. After all, not even Cary Grant could avoid looking silly in the Capra version as uppity theater critic Mortimer Brewster, trying to fight off the marital advances of Elaine (Jacqueline Burnett, replacing Andrea Fears) while trying to cover up the fact that his two dear aunts, Abby and Martha (Randy Brunk and Joan Neubauer), have poisoned a dozen “lonely” men and buried them in the basement. Richard Harrington’s Mortimer, as was Grant’s, is a bunch of eye-bulging reactions to the nutty goings-on.

La Valley had the right sense to go campy by casting Salvatore Divita--a closer Boris Karloff look-alike than Raymond Massey in the movie--as Mortimer’s evil brother and Scott Davies doing an over-the-top send-up of Peter Lorre as Divita’s wormy assistant.

And no one on stage is having more fun than Don Fraser, charging through doorways and blowing his horn as Teddy (who believes he is Theodore Roosevelt). Burnett’s Elaine, on the other hand, is a winsome, alluring anchor of normality.

In the end, she almost doesn’t have a chance against the loopy Brewsters. The aunts--shunted in Capra’s antiseptic ending--have the last, fatal laugh here. Who said you can’t have the Fourth of July and black comedy too?

‘Arsenic and Old Lace’

A La Habra Depot Theatre production. Written by Joseph Kesselring. Directed by Robin La Valley. Set by Gary White. With Randy Brunk, Jacqueline Burnett, Tom Cherrier, Paul Connelly, Scott Davies, Salvatore Divita, Don Fraser, Richard Harrington, Jeffrey Kinman, Dennis Montgomery, Joan Neubauer, Gene Segal and Kelly Wanberg. Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2:30 p.m. through Nov. 21 at the La Habra Depot Theatre, 311 S. Euclid Ave., La Habra. $8-$10. (310) 691-8900.