Just Saw ‘What The Constitution Means To Me’

And so should you!

Rebecca Lingafelter in What The Constitution Means To Me at Portland Center Stage

Playwright Heidi Schreck’s What The Constitution Means To Me was the most-produced play of 2023. It’s not surprising, as the work feels like it was created specifically for this political moment. However, the play was first written in 2017 and made its Broadway premiere on March 31, 2019. During the final half of the (only?) Trump administration, there was perhaps more optimism that the damage he’d inflicted would prove short-lived. The subject of Schreck’s play — the US Constitution — demonstrates otherwise. Trump enabled a roll back of the "rights revolution" that will endure for generations.

Schreck played herself in the Broadway run and in a filmed version that you can stream on Amazon Prime Video. Portland, Oregon, actor Rebecca Lingafelter plays Heidi Schreck in the Portland Center Stage production that runs until February 18. I was curious how it would work to cast another actor in so personal a role. What The Constitution Means To Me is practically a solo show, where Schreck tackles such issues as abortion, women’s rights, domestic abuse, and immigration while deftly connecting them all to key events from her own life. Lingafelter is amazing and keeps the audience engaged and laughing for an hour and forty-five minutes with no intermission. This is a testament both to her own considerable talent but also Schreck’s stellar script. It’s difficult enough to write yourself as a multi-faceted character but Schreck has created an “everyperson” role that any actor both talented and bold enough can make their own.

After introducing herself to the audience, the adult Schreck becomes an unaffected 15-year-old version of herself — a brilliant, optimistic young woman who gives speeches about what the Constitution personally means to her as a way to earn prize money for college. She perceives this living document as a crucible, a “pot in which you put many different ingredients and boil them together until they transform into something else. Something that is sometimes magic. So you see, our Constitution is like a witch’s cauldron.”

The focus of young Schreck’s impassioned debate is both the Ninth and the 14th Amendments, the latter of which has been much in the news lately. But beyond the insurrection clause, the 14th Amendment granted key rights such as citizenship and equal protection under the law (for most men, at least). The Ninth and 14th Amendments would later combine in what Schreck describes in the most Gen-X way possible as a “Wonder Twins powers activate” moment that provides the basis for a constitutional right to privacy, one that the current Supreme Court has actively dismantled.

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What The Constitution Means To Me had an Off-Broadway run at the New York Theatre Workshop from September 12, 2018 until November 4, 2018. That was smack dab during the Senate Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Justice Brett “Boof”Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh’s appalling confirmation seems so long ago. Then came 2020 and the gut punch of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death just an agonizing few weeks before the presidential election. It was a devastating event for people who valued human rights, especially considering who replaced her. Justice Amy Coney Barrett is one of just six women who have served on the Supreme Court since Sandra Day O’Connor joined in 1981. All the women prior to Barrett supported abortion rights and held off attempts to overturn Roe. O’Connor was the decisive vote in 1992’s Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, which affirmed Roe for another 30 years. At one point during the play, we hear Ginsburg’s 2015 answer to the question, “When will there be enough women on the Supreme Court?” She said, “When there are nine,” but the Right would perversely love nothing more a Court filled with nine Barretts.

Barrett clerked for the late, unlamented Justice Antonin Scalia and was billed as his “heir.” Scalia comes up when Schreck discusses his majority opinion in Castle Rock v. Gonzales, which determined that the police have no affirmative obligation to protect anyone — even a woman, Jessica Lenahan-Gonzales, who’d obtained a restraining order against her abusive husband. Scalia (and Barrett) fundamentally don’t believe in “positive” rights — the idea that individuals in a society are entitled to basic security, education, food, medical care, housing and other assorted hippie stuff. This decision is Schreck’s lightbulb moment that maybe the Constitution is not simply imperfect but perhaps functions perfectly as designed — to protect the interests of powerful white cis men.

There’s an almost funereal aspect to the play now, and during Thursday night’s performance, I could hear a gasp from the audience when Schreck first mentions Roe, like when someone recalls a loved one not long after they’ve passed. The shock of their loss still hits hard. During the six years since this play was first staged, a constitutional right impacting more than half the country was lost — though lost seems a somewhat banal description, as if the right was misplaced or fell between the couch cushions. No, this right was taken, seized by robed priests who interpret the legal gospel however they see fit and with no apparent accountability.

I said that What The Constitution Means To Me is “practically” a solo show, and I should clarify that Schreck shares the stage with two other characters. Andrés Alcalá is compelling in a surprising dual role, and two actual Portland-area students, Divine Crane and Alabaster Richard (depending on the performance) join Lingafelter (now fully herself) in the closing moments to debate whether the Constitution should continue to exist at all. The audience serves as the judges, and Schreck had personally observed during the Kavanaugh hearings that audience members were more inclined to scrap the whole thing and start over. When I saw the play, the selected audience member chose to keep the Constitution in place, perhaps realizing that with government where Majorie Taylor Greene holds power, it’s unlikely that we could do much better. The fault lies not in the Constitution but in our fractured nation.

What The Constitution Means To Me is miraculously a topical play that remains timeless. It’s itself a living document that evolves with the times. If you’re in the Portland area, go see this production.

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