Most Broadway shows stick with playbills. Heidi Schreck hands out take-home copies of the Constitution of the United States of America. Or, as her 15-year-old self puts it in her mostly one-woman performance piece — which is part progressive political lecture, part personal confessional, part manifesto for feminist reform — that “living, warm-blooded, steamy document.”
Red meat for liberal feminists and clearly aimed at inter-generational audiences, “What the Constitution Means to Me,” which opened Sunday night at the Helen Hayes Theater and will run at least through July 21, captures the political restlessness of a moment when many Americans are looking back at the assumptions and power structures behind what they were asked to do in their own past, and feeling plenty ready to view those experiences through a revisionist lens.
The 15-year-old Schreck was ahead of the Constitution-analysis game, even if she didn’t fully realize her own sophistication, let alone imagine that her hugely talented adult self would get to Broadway with her own story.
“It is hot and sweaty,” she says of the fruits of the labors of the Founding Fathers.
At that point, those who love truly incendiary political debate might wish that the former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was both still alive and in the audience. He would surely have risen from his seat and ascended to the stage in hot-and-sweaty rage.
“What the Constitution Means to Me” is not the ideal night out on the town for your average originalist trolling Times Square. Oh no. They don’t get a say here. Not without being mocked.
This one would be even less fun for Mike Pence than was “Hamilton.” At “Constitution,” he would get lectured all night long, not just at the curtain speech.
But for progressive feminists and admirers of solo performers who can combine cheery didacticism with personal vulnerability, melding radical Constitutional theory with genuine warmth and humor? Now we’re talking the right crowd.
If that’s you, this is a terrific time in like-minded company and, most certainly, a Broadway show for a moment of rapid ascendancy in personal narrative, and a time when we’ve all taken our political sides before we pick what show to see.
When she was 15 and growing up in Wenatchee, Washington, Schreck raised cash for college by entering contests at American Legion halls and the like, debating other high-schoolers by relating the Constitution to her own life. In this first part of the show — on a cleverly expressionistic set by Rachel Hauck that evokes the shadowy memory of the teenage experience of debating in front of a room full of older men — the 40-something Schreck re-creates those speeches replete with wry commentary from her more enlightened self, marveling both at her own teenage enthusiasm and the absurdity of the task she was set.
In short order, though, this history of Schreck speechifying is replaced by a broader discussion of how the Constitution impacted Schreck’s own subsequent life, such as her limited freedom to get an abortion, or the inability of America’s most important document to protect the strong women in her own family from generations of violent men.
Schreck is a gifted writer and this personal history is exceptionally compelling. All the way through the one-act piece, you keep admiring the cleverness of this structure and the way Schreck, both as creator and character, sets up the rules and intentionally undermines them, typifying the message of the show, which is saying that the Constitution was born in white, male privilege, designed to protect that subset of America, and maybe needs replacing altogether. She homes in on its obsession with passive rights — those “freedom froms” that ensure our liberty is not impinged upon — and continually suggests they need replacing with a more active document.
There are a few repetitive moments when Schrek seems to launch into discussions that you just heard a few minutes earlier. And the transition of the actor Mike Iveson, who first plays a moderator in the old debates and then reveals his own personal stories, needs better integration into the whole. Charming as Iveson can be, right now it feels like Schreck is bringing out a sympathetic guest star to give herself a break. She might have given herself a fiercer antagonist.
Like “Hamilton” though, this historically important “Constitution” ends up being another reminder of the latent power of theater determined to debate the very core of the American assumptions about democracy, and the way in which it draws connections between all of our lives and the old laws that govern them truly is formidable. Like that big musical a couple of blocks away, Schreck understands that everything in the best political theater is always personal — for her and for us, whomever we may be. Despite its dispensing with so many of the usual rules, this piece will be a huge hit with its core demographic. And Schreck’s spirit of warm inclusion is just as important there as what she has to say.
In the last few minutes of the show, Schreck brings out a real teenager of the current moment — the super smart Thursday Williams at the performance I saw — allowing her both to explore what teens think today and to function as a kind of teacher-coach, personally freeing the young woman from some of the constraints of debating in the last century. In front of slightly creepy old men.
It is as if Schreck has found a way to access, and interact with, her teenage essence, trapped in a less-woke America, and it is enormously effective, offering something crucial to all political shows, which is hope for the future.
“What the Constitution Means to Me” plays at the Helen Hayes Theater, 240 W. 44th St.; 212-239-6200 or constitutionbroadway.com
