Some critics have found the structure rambling (Ben Brantley called it “agreeably baggy”), the ending frustratingly unresolved. This is more or less deliberate. “I always knew on a gut level it needed to be digressive and unpredictable and slightly out of my control,” she said later when we’d left the center and found “the giant Philly cheesesteak,” Ms. Schreck, a cheesesteak virgin, had requested.
She wanted to make a play, not a TED Talk, she explained between tentative nibbles, a play that would link the cold clarity of legal dictums to “the messy ungovernable way our human lives usually play out,” she said. A tidy ending doesn’t work for her. “I don’t know how the story of our country ends and I don’t know how my own story ends either,” she said.
The trickiest part of that story is the part that’s not exactly hers. At the first Clubbed Thumb performance, when the play turned to the sexual violence her mother, aunt and maternal grandmother had endured, she walked off the stage, overcome she said, with “a kind of primal terror.” She didn’t want the audience to understand these women as victims. She didn’t want to discuss their sexual assault out loud. But she does it every night, reading that story from a stack of index cards, keeping her voice steady and her body still.
Her mother hasn’t seen the show, though she and Ms. Schreck have discussed it in detail. She’d planned to come last fall, but “she was afraid she would cry through the whole thing and I was afraid I would cry through the whole thing,” Ms. Schreck said. She is coming to opening night on Broadway. “So it’s possible that our Broadway opening could be terrible,” Ms. Schreck said.
The Broadway opening may also depend on what happens in the news cycle that day. Though “What the Constitution Means to Me” was developed during other presidencies and mostly sidesteps very current events, it has a way of speaking to its moment, becoming a different text during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, say, or when migrants at the United States-Mexico border were met with tear gas. This uncanny prescience, which Mr. Butler, the play’s director, described as “very spooky,” helped motivate the Broadway transfer.
“Everything that happened in the news just fed into the energy of the audience,” Diana DiMenna, one of the play’s producers, wrote in an email.
