A play about the constitution might sound like retaking a history class you barely passed in high school, but What the Constitution Means to Me by Heidi Schreck is far from it. The play does teach a thing or two about the constitution, but more, it shows how real people and their stories have been and continue to be influenced by this powerful document.
What the Constitution Means to Me premiered on Broadway in 2019, with Schreck in the lead role. The show was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and received national acclaim. Now, it’s at the Milwaukee Rep’s Stiemke Studio through March 17, having been extended due to high demand.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
Heidi (Jessie Fisher) revisits the constitutional debate competitions hosted by the American Legion she participated in as a teenager to save money to go to college. Breaking the fourth wall, she addresses the audience and asks us to pretend she’s back in that moment in time, debating what the constitution meant to her as a teen. She reflects on what it meant to her then, and continues to break the fourth wall, freezing the scene, to share how that has changed as she’s grown, reflecting on her own life and also the lives of the women in her family who have come before her.
As the show continues, however, the memory and present day become nearly inextricable – the fourth wall blurring, the play itself becoming a “penumbra,” where Heidi eventually moves out of the past and into the present, into an in between space. She reflects on how the constitution has profoundly affected women, even though the word “woman” is not mentioned in the document once.
And she handles the deep, heart-wrenching realities of women’s history with incredible care, and somehow keeps the show funny and entertaining as well. Fisher brought an encapsulating energy to her performance, bringing Schreck’s storytelling to life with precision, power and grace.
The Legionnaire (William Mobley) began the show as a mandatory listener, timing the constitutional competition and stopping young Heidi when her time was up. But as the play progressed, his listening became more active, and eventually, his character in the memory morphs into present day as well, and as Danny (he breaks character as the legionnaire and becomes an actor), Mobley delivers a beautiful monologue about how his nontoxic masculinity was influenced and shaped by the healthy role models in his life.
It’s hard to choose a single scene or monologue to pull out as exceptional because so many pieces of this performance left me in awe.
The stories about Heidi’s stuffed monkeys George, George the Second and George the Second’s friend was a perfect example of how Schreck – and Fisher in her performance – brought humor to something that was also much more layered. The monkey stories are threaded throughout, but ends with her crying in an airport, to which she reflects, “Maybe that’s the appropriate response to everything that’s going on right now.”
A more chilling moment is when Heidi reads domestic violence laws (that permit it) throughout world history through the present. It’s difficult to listen to but undeniably important to acknowledge and sit with the history of legal violence toward women.
At the end of the play, a real high school student – during the performance I attended it was Maria (Rose) Campbell from Whitefish Bay High School – did a live unscripted debate based on Mock Trial rules with Fisher. The lively debate was over an interesting question: “Should the U.S. abolish the constitution?” And both had great arguments. The audience got to participate and ultimately choose the winner of the debate. It was a fun and thought-provoking way to end the show, and I found it really cool that they brought high schoolers in to show young people’s perspective on the country.
This show isn’t a history textbook. It’s about lives and how they were shaped by a historic document. Schreck lays out all the hard truths about the U.S., but she does it in a way that feels approachable and understandable – a way that makes it feel human-centered and real. She took statistics about domestic violence in the U.S., recordings of Supreme Court judges considering birth control, real stories from her family history and more, and wove it all together into a story that not only made sense but made the weight of it all sink in. It’s easy for us to go about our lives and not think too hard about it all, but this play asks you to do just that.
Like the show promised, it felt like we were left with more questions than answers, but it inspired deep conversation. My partner and I talked for over two hours after the show – we were both enraged and empowered, reflecting on our own privilege, power and place in creating positive change.
