25. Riding Momentum for Our Next Play
Lessons of the 'Troupe 1931' Theater Ensemble
The original author of these essays was Ingeborg Franke von Wangenheim.
There’s an old rule-of-thumb in the theater: By the second or third day after premiering a finished work, actors become restless if they have nothing new to work on. In our case, this principle applied to a lesser degree. The real cause of our restlessness went much deeper. Some of our members embraced a bad attitude, nurtured by certain popularly held illusions of acquiring individual fame and wealth.
Some of our actors subsequently began to question the value of our collective work. Others felt that we weren’t being productive enough and blamed our work-process for it. They tended to fix blame on individuals (other than themselves), and challenged Gustav Wangenheim’s authority, as author/director.
For a time after the rehearsals for “The Mousetrap” ended, a certain malaise of inactivity took over. The bad mood hung over the entire troupe, like a cloud. At that point, some of us returned to the familiar routine of taking our individual work to other stages — working cabaret projects with our own- or others’ material. Some of us were doing this on an almost-daily basis, admittedly at some cost to the collective health of Troupe31.
