At the performance I saw, Rosdely Ciprian, a preternaturally composed 14-year-old New Yorker, spoke for abolishment. (At alternate performances, the guest debater is Thursday Williams.) Ms. Ciprian’s arguments, honed during a year of the play’s development, are sophisticated and cutting, and often hilarious. But so are Ms. Schreck’s. Of course, at other performances, they might wind up arguing the opposite positions.
That they are debating at all is an antidote to grimness. It’s also an instance of theatrical activism at its purest, modeling the world the play hopes to achieve: one in which even first principles are open to vigorous, orderly debate, and in which all stakeholders, not just powerful ones, are invited to the podium.
After all, Ms. Schreck points out, it would have been impossible for two women to argue policy on a public stage when the Constitution was written. They couldn’t have voted until 1920. Even then, the barriers faced by Ms. Ciprian, who is Dominican-American, and Ms. Williams, who is Jamaican-American, might well have been insuperable.
Being underage, they can’t vote now, either; some of the unexpected joy of “What the Constitution Means to Me” comes from the hope that people so smart and passionate and ready for change will soon be part of the electorate.
Joy comes too from watching an imaginative new kind of theater emerge. It doesn’t come from nowhere, of course: In some ways, “What the Constitution Means to Me” recalls Lisa Kron’s memoir play “Well,” in which a prepared speech about urban decline is hijacked by a mother who begs to differ. In other ways, Ms. Schreck’s play seems to be part of the wave of formal experimentation being led by young black playwrights today.
Linking these works is a sense of backlash and betrayal. But in the wake of tragedy, Ms. Schreck offers something more than catharsis. “What the Constitution Means to Me” is one of the things we always say we want theater to be: an act of civic engagement. It restarts an argument many of us forgot we even needed to have.
