Reviewed by: What the Constitution Means to Me by Heidi Schreck Natka Bianchini WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME. By Heidi Schreck. Directed by Marielle Heller. Amazon Prime Video, October 16, 2020. What the Constitution Means to Me, Heidi Schreck’s mostly solo show about her experience as a teenager giving speeches on the US Constitution for prize money at American Legion Halls across the country, has had amazingly prescient timing. While Schreck developed and workshopped the piece for about a decade, its official theatrical premiere, at New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) in fall 2018, coincided with the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Two years later, the film version of the show premiered on Amazon’s Prime Video just days before Justice Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed in October 2020. The themes of Schreck’s show—how the Constitution has failed to protect women from domestic violence over centuries of inherited trauma on both the personal and national levels—were heightened against the political backdrop of these confirmations: two staunchly conservative justices poised to further imperil the same rights and protections that Schreck exposes as threadbare and insufficient. Prior to its streaming release, Schreck’s show was an established success. After extending the initial run at NYTW, the production (directed for the stage by Oliver Butler) was remounted at the Hayes Theater on Broadway, where it ran from March to August 2019. Schreck was nominated for two Tony Awards, and the production subsequently enjoyed a national tour. In its final weeks on Broadway, film director Marielle Heller recorded several performances at the Hayes to create the version available on Amazon. Like the stage show, the film runs 100 intermission-less minutes, attempting to replicate onscreen the embodied experience of witnessing the performance live. Schreck begins by reenacting the competition speech she gave on the Constitution as a 15-year-old high school student. Rachel Hauck’s brilliantly claustrophobic set recreates in vivid detail the American Legion Hall in Wenatchee, Washington. The set is a masterpiece of period details: wood paneling, maroon carpet, and a blond-wood, tabletop podium flanked by flags. But the most salient feature of the design is the suffocating rows of framed portraits: men in uniform, stacked four rows high and surrounding Schreck on three sides of a doorless room, more than 150 in all. As Schreck reveals that the twentieth century saw more American women killed by male partners than the total US combat fatalities for all wars combined, including 9/11, concluding that “rampant violence against women’s bodies is there underneath everything, all the time, humming,” the unspoken yet menacing threat of these silent portraits is inescapable. Click for larger view View full resolution Heidi Schreck in What the Constitution Means to Me. (Photo: Joan Marcus.) [End Page 251] Because so much of the show is a solo performance and because it lacks any whizz-bang moments of technical wizardry, What the Constitution Means to Me is ideally suited for this transfer to the small screen. Yet one element of the film I found striking was Heller’s decision to include many audience-reaction shots, reminding the viewer frequently that this was a live performance. During the theatrical run (which I also had the privilege of seeing), Schreck was lit onstage and the audience was, save for a few key moments, in darkness. Heller brought in extra lighting instruments to illuminate the audience during filming. This allowed her to capture dozens of audience-reaction shots and edit them into the film. The editing highlights the success of the show as a dialogue between performer and audience, and underscores the audience’s role as active participant—a vocal counterpart to the wordless stares of those framed male portraits on-stage. Schreck herself is white and careful both to note her family’s white privilege and to lift up the stories of women of color who are even more vulnerable under the US legal system. The audience, at least as showcased through Heller’s editing choices, is surprisingly diverse in race, age, and gender (a rarity for Broadway), and so Heller is able to punctuate Schreck’s words by whose faces she shows...
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Open Access
Jul 27, 2021
Andrea R Bellot 
