What the Constitution Means to Me
Playwright Heidi Schreck’s interrogation of our nation’s founding document is just about as clever and engaging a way as I can imagine to get theater audiences to reconsider its worth — or even just consider it at all. She knows she can’t just harangue the crowd about the way that lots of people — but especially women — have been underserved by its famous amendments; she knows she needs to make it personal. This is theater, not a classroom. (At one point, she skewers Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia for debating the precise meaning of the word “shall” in a case involving a woman whose children were murdered by her ex after the police failed to act on her requests for help. Scalia might argue that it’s his job to interpret the law, not to bring justice. Schreck wants him — or rather, she wants the audience — to consider the people.)
Or maybe that should read: this is theater, not an American Legion hall hosting a speech competition between a 15-year-old Schreck and her arch-rival, whose speech is entitled “The Constitution is a Patchwork Quilt.” (Shreck would rather argue that it’s a crucible, or, as she puts it, a witch’s cauldron, the better to reference the Salem witch trials.) But even in that hall, the young women are expected to make personal connections with the Consitution, and the “emotionally guarded” teen does not really want to do that. She especially doesn’t want to talk about her great-grandmother, who died of "melancholia" in a mental institution at the age of 36.
Except Shreck does want to talk about her great-grandmother. And her abused grandmother. And her feminist mother. And her adult self and her road trip to an abortion clinic in another state. And other women. And other groups. So she has actress Jacque Wilke, whose cheerful rictus masterfully conveys all manner of managed interior disquiet, slip from adult-Schreck-playing-teen-Schreck to adult-Schreck-the-narrator to just adult-Schreck to Jacque Wilke-as-herself. She has the stern debate moderator slip out of that character and into the role (?) of a gay actor telling his personal story. She brings in a young debater — or maybe an actress playing a young debater — to argue about whether we ought to scrap our first attempt and start over. It's dramatically dizzying, which helps keep the stage debate from becoming a real one.. It's dramatically dizzying, which helps keep the stage debate from becoming a real one in the viewer's mind. It is, after all, not about what the Constitution means to you,despite the elements of audience participation.
It’s also a passionately progressive affair, performed with humor and without hostility, which is no mean feat, given the emotions and situations involved. (Schreck knows that not everybody is going to share her views on abortion, a subject which looms large in both the personal and political discussions, what Schreck’s own history and the Court’s discovery of a right to privacy in its interplay of clauses.) But it’s not a polemic, thanks in part to the honesty in the stories she shares. At different points, she suggests that both her mother and grandmother were two people in an effort to explain their seemingly contradictory actions. And there’s more than one way to interpret the image of an adult woman sobbing after the recovery of a lost toy.
When
Ongoing until Sunday, March 30, 2025
Hours
| Sundays, 2pm & 7pm |
| Thursdays, 7pm |
| Fridays, 8pm |
| Saturdays, 8pm |