Review: She’s Still Debating ‘What the Constitution Means to Me’

Review: She’s Still Debating ‘What the Constitution Means to Me’

Within the anxiety dream of a lecture hall that is the setting for “What the Constitution Means to Me” — the agreeably baggy and highly topical performance piece that opened Sunday night at the New York Theater Workshop — the writer and actor Heidi Schreck is living out an assortment of roles. They include professor and pupil, class troublemaker and teacher’s pet, the woman in her 40s she is today and the 15-year-old girl she once was.

These various roles, I should add, are not mutually exclusive, and for the most part they are all inhabited by Ms. Schreck simultaneously, in the same exhilarated, frightened and confused breath. If such an all-in-one approach sounds like it might generate ambiguity and ambivalence, well, that’s appropriate to the subject at hand.

That would be the confounding, cohesive and divisive document that is the United States Constitution. This nation-founding set of principles from the late 18th century is — or should be — very much on most Americans’ minds at the moment. For the implementation of said Constitution to meet contemporary needs is largely in the interpretive hands of those men and women (but mostly men) who sit upon the Supreme Court.

That those eminences may or may not wind up including one Brett M. Kavanaugh has been a cause of angry debate in recent days. Ms. Schreck’s show, which has been evolving for more than a decade, never mentions Mr. Kavanaugh by name. But his invisible judiciary presence is there, affirming many of her implicit arguments, which are often indistinguishable from her deepest fears about a document with which she has had a long and complicated relationship.

Those fears were still mostly beneath the surface when Ms. Schreck began addressing the theme of “What the Constitution Means to Me,” which is directed with an invisible hand by Oliver Butler. As a high school student in Wenatchee, Wash., Ms. Schreck became a virtuoso of speech and debate competitions sponsored by the American Legion, winning prize money that paid for her college education.

The participants in such competitions were asked to assess the impact of the Constitution on their own lives. The teenage Ms. Schreck appears to have fudged that part, avoiding close-to-home revelations. She is now more than making up for her past evasiveness.

She relives — and reconsiders — her past oratorical triumphs in a semi-facsimile of the American Legion halls she once haunted, and which continue to haunt her. The designer Rachel Hauck has built a wood-paneled room accessorized with two flags on poles, a speaker’s podium and many, many framed photographs.

The set, Ms. Schreck explains, has been built according to her memories, “like one of those crime-scene drawings.” It deviates from the originals in that — uh-oh — it doesn’t have a door.

Assisted by the downtown theater stalwart Mike Iveson, who appears as the Legionnaire moderator and timekeeper, Ms. Schreck tries to reincarnate her 15-year-old self at the podium. But what the Heidi of today has learned in the intervening years — about herself, her country and the women in her family — keeps inserting itself into her original arguments.

So as Ms. Schreck ponders, say, the significance of the clauses of the 14th Amendment — which her younger self describes as being “like a supercharged force field protecting all your rights” — her older self notes that those rights were available only to men. And as she reveals increasingly more about the generations of women in her family who preceded her — including her maternal grandmother, who was the victim of sustained domestic abuse — Ms. Schreck wonders about just how inclusive that force field is.

The chapters of the life and personae of Ms. Schreck — a successful dramatist and television writer — are not clearly drawn. Her former and latter-day selves, as presented here, are essentially the same eager, questioning and slightly trepidatious individual, torn between the impulses to ingratiate and to challenge.

The sharp-edged shards of autobiography include a story in which a college-age Ms. Schreck does not resist when a male student takes her pants off in a car to have sex because, on some instinctive and probably irrational level, she wonders if he might not otherwise hurt her.

And is this relevant to our consideration of a historic legal document? Well, take another look at that wall of pictures. Its subjects are exclusively white men. So were the audiences of Legionnaires before whom the young Ms. Schreck held forth, and it is how she says she imagines us, now, watching her.

The production feels less like a finished play than an endlessly open-ended conversation, being invented on the spot. (When I consulted the script after seeing to the show, I was surprised by how closely Ms. Schreck had adhered to the letter of it.) It concludes with a postscript in which a young debater of today (in my case, the dazzlingly self-assured, 14-year-old Rosdely Ciprian) squares off against Ms. Schreck to debate whether the current Constitution should be scrapped.

Personally, I could have done with a bit more theatrical manipulation throughout, with more varied heightening of tone and pace. At times, listening to Ms. Schreck can feel like reading page after page of unpunctuated, unparagraphed prose.

But if the show still has the shapelessness of a work-in-progress, that’s appropriate to the subject, isn’t it? The Constitution is an amorphous and ever-morphing, pliable and breathing entity. Ms. Schreck is right to regard it with fear as well as patriotic admiration.

Late in the play, Ms. Schreck describes arriving in Los Angeles for work and realizing she had left a beloved doll, a sock monkey with a storied past, on the plane. Her response was to burst into public howls of rage and lamentation, worthy of a Greek tragedy.

She says she doesn’t know why she’s crying though perhaps it has something to do with centuries of “inherited trauma.” Or maybe she says, “it’s the appropriate response to everything right now.”

It seems safe to say that many of those who came to this show after watching Thursday’s Senate judiciary hearings understood exactly what she was feeling.

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