13. “Eloise is Under an Almond Tree,” a suspense comedy by Enrique Jardiel Poncela

A full-length play. Translated from Spanish to English by Steven Capsuto. Professional and amateur performance rights available.

Set in Madrid, this classic 1940 comedy is a send-up of old Hollywood suspense thrillers, complete with creepy mansions, hidden rooms, furtive butlers, eccentric relatives, a scientist doing secret experiments, and a young couple investigating a murder.

In Spain, this play occupies roughly the same cultural space that Arsenic and Old Lace does in the US: a 1940s suspense comedy that, seemingly, almost every high school has staged at one time or another. Eloise has had frequent professional revivals in Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries.

My translation first appeared in an anthology of Spanish plays in the 1990s. I revised it for a 2015 professional staged reading in London and a 2016 limited-run production in Dublin.