19. ‘The Mousetrap’ Premiers!
Lessons of the 'Troupe 1931' Theater Ensemble
The original author of these essays was Ingeborg Franke von Wangenheim.
After Gustav Wangenheim made the last changes to “The Mousetrap,” we plunged back into a new, final round of dressed rehearsals. This phase lasted only ten days. The intense work we’d already invested in the play enabled it to stand very well on its own.
At the same time, however, we were in dire straits, in regard to operating funds. All of us shared a frightful need for cash; finding theaters in which to stage our production became a life-and-death struggle. How would we bring our “goods to the market”? This became the newest issue that racked all our brains.
At this point, Wangenheim and others of us with connections began arranging a national “audition tour” for the play, in which we took a bare-bones “ghost version” of the production on the road, giving theater owners around Germany their own, private peek at it. We couldn’t bring any of our finished stage sets on that long-distance road tour, for example, because this would force the theater-owners to burden their already-overtaxed workers into “donating” off-hours, unpaid labor. (Getting theater-owners to look at our work was hard enough!) So, we struck the more complicated sets and props from our packing list and substituted the most important pieces with slices of hand-painted cardboard.
