‘What the Constitution Means to Me’ @ Stage West

Photos/art courtesy of Stage West

—Jan Farrington

Pen·​um·​bra pə-ˈnəm-brə  A space of partial illumination (as in an eclipse) between the perfect shadow on all sides and the full light. A body of rights held to be guaranteed by implication in a civil constitution.

Stage West’s potent production of Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me could not have arrived at a more timely moment. We Americans are having some tough conversations right now, and Schreck’s play (a Pulitzer-Prize finalist), which both uplifts and challenges our perceptions of the document behind the “more perfect union’ we’ve been trying to grow, is a blood-pumping experience.

Who knew the 14th Amendment (and some dry audio snippets of Supreme Court deliberations) could keep an audience leaning forward in fierce urgency?

Under Dana Schultes’ direction, Megan Noble is fired up (and funny) in the role originated by the playwright herself. At age 15, Heidi Schreck earned college money by touring American Legion halls to debate locals on whether to keep the Constitution—or write a new version. Noble also portrays the 50-year-old Heidi, who brings a lifetime of perspective to her adult view of the document. The switch is a comic physical release: grown-up Heidi tells us the girl she was had been raised to be “psychotically polite”—and “my face hurts from so much smiling.”

The action takes place in an evocative American Legion hall in a small town, wood-paneled walls lined with photos of local veterans in uniform. (Leah Mazur designed the set.) I asked the elderly man sitting next to me if he’d worn one of those uniforms; he smiled and said, “Army, Vietnam.” We, Heidi told us, were sitting in for the audience of veterans who would come to hear her at every stop.

Debate rules suggest that speakers try to make personal connections between the topic and their own lives. Heidi uses family stories—some of them painful to tell—stretching back generations, and memories from her own life to explore constitutional issues of rights, protections, effectiveness. There’s a case to be made (and she makes it) that the document has created more problems for women, minorities, the disabled and other non-powerful groups than it’s solved.

Opinions will differ. But the playwright makes some terrific points I never heard in civics class. (Civics class, remember?) The U.S. consitution, unlike most modern democratic counterparts, is a “negative rights” document, spreading a vague umbrella of protection, but not enumerating specific, detailed rights. Women, Heidi notes, aren’t mentioned until “page 27” of the pocketbook Constitution we find at our seats. And when SCOTUS was considering the case of Roe v. Wade in the early 1970s, it was based on finding the “penumbra”—the shadow in the corner—of a right to privacy used as the bedrock of that ruling.

Schreck has updated the script since I saw the play just before the pandemic, and it reflects current events. “We are losing rights as we speak,” Heidi says. The play evolves into a debate (with a scary-smart teenager played by Solaris Khalid the night I attended; she alternates with Ellen Reid), and the audience gets to choose whether we should keep (and try to improve) the document we have, or chuck it and draft a modern “positive rights” new version.

The arguments fly fast and furious, and the time is carefully stop-watched by actor David Wilson-Brown as Legionnaire Danny. He’s been the veteran in charge (sort of) all evening, and finally takes his uniform jacket off to tell us a bit of his story too.

As the play moves on, the audience is pulled into the action. There is a vote, but the hum of talk continues after the show. Is it enough to let an unstated, implied “penumbra” of rights be the source of protection we thought were more solid than that? How can we trust a document that has very successfully sustained the rights of the powerful, but that too often has delayed or blocked progress for generations of “other” Americans? Are the old words enough, or do we need some new ones—declarations of what we want and need and hope for today?

What the Constitution Means to Me will ride home with you—and, perhaps, form a shadowy cluster of ideas you keep rolling around in your mind. Is history moving in a direction we want for our lives and our loved ones? If not, what can we do? What “parts” of our democratic government can we move, improve, change—probably not alone, but perhaps with collective action? Yes, it will make your head hurt…but consider teenage Heidi and her fierce commitment to this country (and her college fund).

We owe it to her, and to all our young people.

WHEN: October 17-November 3, 2024
WHERE: Stage West, 821 West Vickery, Fort Worth
WEB: stagewest.org