Shattering, galvanizing and very funny, Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me close reads an old text in new and breathlessly exciting ways.
When Schreck, a longtime off-Broadway actor and more recently a playwright, was a teenager, she traveled around American Legions Halls, winning money for college by delivering a speech called Casting Spells: The Crucible of the Constitution. In this mostly solo show (she is joined by the actor Mike Iveson as a legionnaire and later by a teenage debater), Schreck – sunny in a daffodil blazer – stands inside a re-creation of one of those halls. (The design is by Rachel Hauck.) Persuasively, she conjures both that brace-faced Patrick Swayze-swooning teenager, and the woman she became.
That woman has had to reckon with how the constitution has failed to protect the women in her family – and so many other women, the statistics are devastating – from intimate partner violence. Though Schreck spent years hopelessly devoted to the US constitution, she now realizes that it is what it was “designed to do from the beginning, which is to protect the interests of a small number of rich, white property owners”.
There’s a children’s party game called pass the parcel in which the party giver tucks small toys small between sheet after sheet of wrapping paper. Each torn-away sheet reveals a new prize and that’s how What’s the Constitution Means to Me works. If it can sometimes feel digressive in its rush from comedy to drama to memoir, constitutional law lecture to gently participatory debate, every layer has its own gift to give. Schreck, a performer of chart-busting personal charm, is a gift herself. Even if you are, like me, not a big crier, the play can move you from tears to laughter at a velocity almost impossible. It shifts, persistently, between the macro and the micro, showing how broad concepts of law and governance effect individual lives in the most intimate ways.
Written in the Obama years, What the Constitution Means to Me seems bespoke for the Trump ones, but in its specificity and generosity, it is capacious enough to move with the times. I had first seen it last September, Off-Broadway, during the Brett J Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. On that night, the audience, mostly women, seemed restive. Fingers furiously swiped at phone screens; expressions were grim. With its discussion of how the constitution has elided and failed to protect American women, the play gave that audience a place to put that anger and maybe even a way to work through it. Now at the end of March, different lines resonated, like a clause in the 14th amendment that evoked the family separation policy. Next week, next month, its meanings may shift again.
The show feels a little broader than it did Off-Broadway, a little spikier, a little more frenetic, sometimes but not always for the good. Apparently it hasn’t become any easier to perform and in a section that describes the spousal abuse her grandmother experienced, Schreck had to stop and take a few breaths, overcome, she said, with “survivor’s guilt”. The line about survivor’s guilt is in the script. The breakdown isn’t.
Even though the material is often harrowing and a meaningful consideration of how American is or isn’t functioning as a democracy ought to be a real downer, the show isn’t. The ending, a debate between Schreck and a high school student (Thursday Williams and Rosdely Ciprian alternate in the role), suggests a hard-won optimism. It presents the US constitution as profoundly flawed, but capable of improvement. The promise of a more just, more equal union has not been foreclosed. But a more perfect solo show? Broadway won’t see one for years.