Review: "The Mousetrap" Gives an Actor's-Eye View of Performing for Hamlet

The Mousetrap, or Prince Hamlet wrote a dumb play and now we have to do it…

Written by Margaret Rose Caterisano

Directed by Jackson Paul Walker

Presented by Broomstick Theatre Co. at UNDER St. Marks

94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC

August 2-14, 2025

If in William Shakespeare's England, plays were required to be approved by the Stationer's Register and playwrights would take care not to openly criticize the current monarchy, in today's United States, a major network has curried favor for a merger by canceling a show critical of the government, while the government itself takes time out to attack episodes of South Park that satirize its officials. In this environment of governmental attacks on the arts, The Mousetrap, or Prince Hamlet wrote a dumb play and now we have to do it…, from playwright and professor Margaret Rose Caterisano, takes up the question of the place of art in calling out those in power through a return to Hamlet and its play-within-a-play that dramatizes the corruption of Hamlet's uncle, King Claudius. The hilarious, bitingly satirical Mousetrap is part of the FRIGID New York's 5th annual Little Shakespeare Festival (July 31-August 17), themed “Not Your English Teacher’s Shakespeare” and curated by artist and educator Conor Mullen, who also appears in the improvised As You Will at the festival.

The Mousetrap focuses on the roving troupe of actors who enact the titular performance, which depicts Claudius's murder of Hamlet's father and wooing of his mother, at Hamlet's request. The troupe here comprises actors Jack (James Silverstein) and Sue (Elli Caterisano) and their stage manager, Joanna (Mackenzie Menter). The play opens with megaphone-wielding Claudius (Eric Austin, delivering an at-first subtle but spot-on parody of the current president) addressing the people, mostly about his unprecedented greatness, with the giggling Gertrude (Haley Fortune, exuding throughout a different strain of vacuous self-importance) and her ever-present miniature Danish flag by his side. We then shift to backstage with the actors–a props table on one side and a dressing table on the other, with gauzy curtains from behind which Claudius spoke along the rear–where Jack, complaining that he never gets to play the pretty characters, has convinced Sue to swap roles with him, so that he will be the queen and she the king in their performance for the court. As they prepare for the show and squabble over just over where Jack's prop crown has gotten to, we learn about more important disagreements among the troupe: specifically, whether to have come to Elsinore at all, much less perform for the king and queen at the prince's behest. Despite their growing doubts–Sue, for instance, correctly observes that they have agreed to commit sedition with this performance–in this situation, "the show must go on" is less a maxim and more a blunt fact. The solution that they hit upon to try to mitigate their danger is also a clever take on the fact that in the text of Hamlet, Hamlet asks the players to act The Murder of Gonzago, into which he will insert "some dozen or sixteen lines" but when the players actually later perform, the section that would seem to represent Hamlet's additions takes the form of a dumb show, which is then followed by a prologue and dialogue between the Player King and Player Queen. After their performance, the players are interrogated by Gertrude, later joined by Claudius, putting them in an unsought position to very literally speak truth to power. Do they take this opportunity? Should they? And where, if anywhere, is choice in all of this?

Questions of choice inhere in how Jack agrees to perform for Hamlet partly because the prince is not only charismatic but also very attractive: but, as Sue points out, Jack is only able to more or less make this choice for the rest because Hamlet chooses to talk to the man in the group (men with power, the play notes, often make life worse for those around them, especially women–just think of Ophelia). At the same time that the elite can impose choices upon people like the players, ethical obligation might be seen to make its own imposition: was the choice to confront corruption and immorality in effect made as soon as they chose to be theater artists? Does speaking out necessarily fall to artists when no one else is speaking up, even if it seems that, as one character worries, one might pay a high price to do something no one cares about? In the play's final scene (excepting an epilogue, which reminds us, among other points, that the ruling class doesn't always actually know or care much about ruling), it positions the audience as witnesses to the consequences for the players, as individuals who must also choose to speak out or be silent about what is happening before their eyes.

Once the players perform The Mousetrap, there is no going back for them, as neatly symbolized by their inability to put a springing snake back in the can that served as their vial of poison. The scene in which the players perform, accompanied by a change in the lighting and curtains, takes on the atmosphere, aided by the music that plays, of the carnivalesque, to excellent effect (we would be frankly happy to watch an entire Hamlet in this style). Whether the players, with Jack the most impulsive and energetic and Joanna the most controlled, are playfully mocking one another or feelingly debating what kind of people and artists they should be, Silverstein, Caterisano, and Menter infuse their characters' relationships with a lived-in quality that sharpens both the comedy and the pathos of their performances. Performing certainly changes the lives of the players in The Mousetrap. What, then, of the non-diegetic impact of performance, and art more generally? Ultimately, The Mousetrap posits that little ripples can make a big difference–a very fitting thesis for the Little Shakespeare Festival.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards