Joan Marcus
The impulse to tear down and start over, as ancient as we are, occasionally makes a bigger noise of itself than usual. World War I, that was a loud one. Sacco and Vanzetti, loud. The Sex Pistols, really loud. The noise was so loud in 2016 it handed the earths most important job to a reality TV host whod distilled the impulse into a catchphrase, and just might get so loud in 2020 that “Youre Fired!” comes back to haunt him.
All of which is to say, Heidi Schreck has crazy perfect timing. A playwright and performer whose indelible, subversive and audaciously funny What The Constitution Means To Me opens tonight on Broadway at the Helen Hayes Theatre, Schreck has carried a particular true-life story within her for 30-odd years, and she springs it on us when we need it most.
Blending autobiography with U.S. history, social studies, civics and at least one or two other high school classes you only wish were this much fun, Schreck arrives on a stage designed by Rachel Hauck to resemble all the wood-paneled meeting rooms of all the American Legion halls Schreck visited in her teens to participate in the debate and speech competitions that would eventually fund her entire college education and give this play its title. Dozens of photos of presumably dead Legionnaires, all men, line the walls, watching.
Directed by Oliver Butler, Constitution opens with Schreck, in jeans, white shirt and bright yellow blazer bounding onto the set. After describing her long-ago debate career (shed later be a successful TV writer with Nurse Jackie and Billions, among others), Schreck says she started thinking again about the Constitution a few years ago “for various reasons” – the sly delivery gets a laugh – and wonders what, exactly, so captured the devotion of a teenage girl. “Because I did, I loved it,” she says, her voice as loud and enthusiastic as that high schooler trying to impress her judges. “I was a zealot!”
For much of the rest of its 90 minutes, Schreck, a monologist (with a little help from friends, but more of that later) in a league with John Leguizamo and Spalding Grey, will shift back and forth from the girl she was to the woman she is, delivering the speech that so many Legionnaires loved with the interruptions that the wiser and world-wearier adult Schreck cant resist adding.
But before we get to those interruptions, a word on the old speech. Its terrific, in and of itself. Of course we cant know just how accurately the playwright is recalling her 15-year-old self, but the bits and pieces we hear are marvelous – as optimistic, weird and dark as the teenager obsessed with sex, Patrick Swayze and the Salem witch trials Shreck says she was.
Like someone too frustrated to let a joke-teller get away with leaving out a crucial part of the set-up, the adult Schreck will interject with fresh insights, updated history and her own personal reflections – at one point well into the 90 minute play, Schreck sends her younger self and the shows initial premise packing, doffing the yellow jacket and the excitable voice, lowering her vocal register with a conspiratorial, re-introductory “hello.”
As the play proceeds, Schreck deconstructs not only the Constitution, but her younger, more naive view of a document that had to be so grudgingly forced to protect women, African Americans, Native Americans, and the LGBTQ population. She wonders whether countries with newer constitutions – based on “positive rights,” like the right to health care or education – rather than “negative rights” – the government cant lock us up without due cause – would better serve a population more diverse than the Founding Fathers could ever have imagined.
Along with talk of the 9th and 14th Amendments, theres personal history, parallels drawn and connections made between the civics lessons and the harrowing accounts of the depressions, suicides and sexual and domestic violence that have hounded the women in Schrecks extended family for generations. Shell recall a college incident in which a boy, who remains a friend to this day (well, a Facebook friend) removed her pants before the two engaged in sex that even now shes pretty sure was consensual.
I had read Audre Lord and Gloria Steinem and bell hooks. I was taking AdvRead More – Source
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