THERE’S A GOOFINESS, delighting in its way, about Heidi Schreck. She greets us sweetly at the very beginning of her (almost) one-person production What the Constitution Means to Me, in an example of what we’ll later recognize as her self-diagnosed “psychotically polite” behavior – a result, she says, of being raised in the North-Western version of small-town America.
We should beware – that goofiness, it will emerge, is cloaking one hell of a sharp punch. This is a subtly-measured “play”. Schreck often calls it “a play” during her constantly self-referential performance, but that label is questionable – actually inadequate – for describing the one-of-a-kind entity she’s created. It opened at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theater last night (March 31st) after extended off-Broadway runs last Fall, and before that a premiere in the Clubbed Thumb incubating theater group’s Summerworks program of 2017.
The piece dates back even further than that – three decades in fact, since Schreck’s idea is based on her teen years when she earned prize-money, to eventually pay her way through college, by competing in speech-making competitions organized by the American Legion in its regional and local halls. High-school students would declaim on the subject that has become Schreck’s deceptively plain title – under a Legion mandate to speak of the Constitution’s direct relevance to their own young lives. Shreck gets to (kind-of, and not all of the time) play herself at fifteen.
What the Constitution has meant to her … entails a multiplicity of notions presented over the course of two bouncy and yet often deeply affecting hours – notions that veer strikingly between grandly noble … workaday … ironic … and utterly, bitterly mendacious.
At the risk of over-simplification, I’ll say that Shreck in effect centers on the Fourteenth Amendment (the “equal protection of the laws” amendment, as she helpfully emphasizes) and on the experience of four generations of women in her family. These begin with her great, great grandmother, a mail-order bride from Germany who died at 36 of ‘melancholia’ in a mental hospital … and ends with herself … but then also, in a touching coda, looks forward to the next generation (not biologically in her family, but sharing a deep human affinity).
MAYBE SCHRECK’S SHARPEST CRITIQUE of ‘this living document’ is its failure to genuinely provide “equal protection of the laws” to women – against the violence of men, and especially men close to them. She relates the violence in her own family squarely and discomfitingly – generational violence, she tells us, that ended with her feminist (simply-stated) mother, who testified in court against her step-father at the age of 14.
But even alongside this recitation of brutality, there are laughs. Shreck tries to counter the picture of her grandmother as suffering from ‘battered woman syndrome’ by recounting her height (6 feet tall) her physique (“big muscles“) and her part-time profession – Log-Runner (standing on a raft in rushing water, with a pole pushing logs to propel them down river). And she suddenly, comically mimes her grandmother’s mighty movements all the way across the stage and back, alarming her male sidekick – Mike Iveson as the American Legion master-of-ceremonies (above right), who’s in danger of being over-run. “My favorite part of the play,” Shreck appears to ad-lib.
It’s just momentary respite – and the piece’s overall drive will reinforce for us the pervasively negative psychological, economic and yes, legal and constitutional conditioning inflicted upon American women, keeping them historically subjugated. And leaving them, much of the time, with only (as Schreck points out) “covert resistance” available to them.
But some, just some, of the time in more recent years … the law can be made to help. And tellingly, it’s with someone else’s voice entirely that the ‘play’ reaches an end – for the inescapable truth is that we have to rely on the people who interpret the Constitution on our behalf. What we hear is the recorded voice of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg describing the best composition for the highest bench in the land:
When will there be enough women on the Court? My answer is: When there are nine.
Along the way to this point, of course, the Constitution’s effective exclusion of indigenous, black and brown people as a whole has been duly noted … though frankly it’s with less piercing incisiveness than gets applied specifically to women’s lack of rights).
Once the ‘play’ is at an end (with Ginsburg’s quote) – what takes over is debate. For this, an actually teenaged actor and debater enters. (And when I was there, it was high-school freshman Rosdely Ciprian (left), who alternates with 17 year-old Thursday Williams (below) as the self-described “young brown girl in modern America”). The debate is between the youngster and the real-life 48 year-old Schreck; when I saw them, Schreck defended the Constitution against the younger woman’s proposition that it should be abolished and rewritten – but proponent and opponent can be switched any night, on the flip of a coin.
We the audience get to judge who has the stronger argument, and one of our number gets to announce the judgement. I would report the result from the performance I attended – but this is truly a case where the free debate of ideas is more important than the outcome. Go see it. Either now on Broadway – or in the national tour it’s undoubtedly headed for afterward.
