In the 1940s and thereabouts Munro Leaf wrote a number of bestselling children’s books boasting titles like Manners Can Be Fun and Brushing Your Teeth Can Be Fun. As far as I know he never wrote one called The Constitution Can Be Fun.
Were one needed—and when more than in these parlous times has the much assailed Constitution needed championing more?—the person to write the cheerful, encouraging tome would obviously be Heidi Schreck. Matter of fact, she’s already drafted it as a stage presentation under the What the Constitution Means to Me title. It’s a moniker that also deliberately conjures memories of earnest high school oratorical contests.
Schreck’s somewhat uncategorical piece—you couldn’t call it a play, you couldn’t call it merely a lecture—is loads of fun, as it takes over the wide New York Theatre Workshop after developmental stops at Summerworks 2017 and Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
[Read Jesse Oxfeld’s ★★★★ review here.]
Yes, the unique outing is a barrel of laughs, while at the same time being seriously instructive. (I happened to attend a preview performance immediately after watching the Christine Blasey Ford-Brett Kavanaugh Senate hearings when it felt as if Schreck, who briefly alluded to the day’s events, had composed What the Constitution Means to Me for that very occasion.)
She hadn’t, of course. When she arrives on Rachel Hauck’s set representing a men’s club hall (Veterans of Foreign Wars, something else, I forget which) with over 200 framed photographs of important previous members, she explains that when she was 15 and coaxed and coached by her mother, she earned money to get through college by entering and usually winning honoring-the-Constitution contests. In case you’re wondering, she reached the goal.
Then just about immediately, she asks the audience to pretend they’re cigar-smoking men in an all-male audience attending to her 15-year-old self delivering a fervent speech based on her commitment to the Constitution.
The evening’s supposed interlocutor (Mike Iveson) introduces her, whereupon she intones her screed. (She has already noted that she has had to reimagine it, as her mother uncharacteristically threw the actual speech away years earlier.)
Schreck launches into a highly animated talk about, as she sees it, the Constitution being “a crucible” in which many parts are collected and ground together to their synergistic betterment. She recalls that throughout the contests in which she participated her most effective competitor was a young girl who called the Constitution “a patchwork quilt.” The young Schreck adamantly and slyly insists the document is not a patchwork quilt and goes on to detail why.
While declaiming the ins and outs of—at this performance anyway—the ninth and fourteenth amendments (if you don’t know them by heart, look them up), she sticks to being her adolescent self. But every once in a while she says she must reenter her 40-ish self to offer more contemporary insights. At one point, Iveson, who’s been playing the taciturn, uniformed host, drops his guise, too, and talks as himself, a gay man, in terms of those related civil rights aspects of Constitutional rights.
Towards the end of the 90-minute stay under Oliver Butler’s shrewd direction, Schreck mentions that these sorts of Constitution-honoring contests continue. To prove her point, she brings out a young debater to contend with. I saw 14-year old Rosdely Ciprian, who was so confident about her abilities that I pictured her finishing the night by going off to advise a needy politician (Orrin Hatch perhaps?). Thursday Williams is the debater on alternate nights.
The debate Schreck and Ciprian fought was over whether the Constitution, as it stands now, should be abolished. A coin toss determined that in the proposition-opposition-opposition-proposition set-up Scheck would argue that the Constitution should be replaced and she’d make her argument first.
Don’t ask me if the debate has the same proposal every night and/or whether the propositions and oppositions are predetermined. Much is done to make it all look spontaneous. There’s the coin toss and both sides given time to make notes before their one-minute-two-minute-30-second declarations. By the way, an audience member chooses the debate’s winner. (Ciprian was my night’s winner.)
I bought the debate’s spontaneity. I bought Schreck’s whole kit and caboodle for the same reason that underneath the laughter and her quick way with an adlib, she means everything she’s saying. At times, she gets autobiographical and discusses her great-grandmother and grandmother, who were married to abusive men. She lets it be known she resents the patriarchy under which the Constitution was carpentered. She’s vastly amusing, all right, but she’s also unmistakably politically engaged. You love her for it.
What the Constitution Means to Me opened September 30, 2018 and runs to December 30. Tickets and information: nytw.org
