15. Challenges of Self-Reflection
Lessons of the 'Troupe 1931' Theater Ensemble
The original author of these essays was Ingeborg Franke von Wangenheim.
Our kind of advocacy-theater does not come easily, of course. Experience tells us that it requires a good amount of trial and error.
Especially as we became a traveling theater troupe, we found ourselves playing before new — and sometimes very different — audiences at every stop. A bourgeois theater-goer won’t necessarily laugh at the joke meant for intellectuals; nor do the “intelligentsia” necessarily sit with iron faces while the workers alone shake with laughter.
During the past three years of staging our work, the author and players of Troupe31 have learned to be versatile and to change our expectations from one performance to the next — and even within a single performance. Although we consciously wrote some lines and scenes with our bourgeois audience in mind, the proletarians also came to understand those lines, and vice versa. Fortunately — and in a very strange way, over time — all the threads seemed to come together for us.