REVIEW: What the Constitution Means to Me froths with urgency

iPhoto caption: What the Constitution Means to Me production still by Dahlia Katz.

Reviews

/By Karen Fricker / Nov 5, 2024

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This review contains mild spoilers of What the Constitution Means to Me at Soulpepper Theatre.

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Before seeing this show, I’ll admit that I’d never thought very actively about the U.S. Constitution, despite growing up in the U.S. as an American citizen. I don’t remember taking a civics class in school, and before Friday night’s opening of What the Constitution Means to Me, my knowledge had remained at Schoolhouse Rock level.

American actor-turned-playwright Heidi Schreck, by contrast, has been a Constitution geek since her mid-teens, when she started debating that founding document in oratorical contests to earn money for university. In a doozy of a theatrical indie-to-blockbuster story, this autobiographical play about her relationship to the Constitution started out as a short piece for an East Village avant-garde variety night in 2007, turned into a full-length show in 2017, and ended up a Broadway hit in 2019.

Now that the play is having its Canadian premiere, involving no fewer than four Ontario theatres (co-producers are Soulpepper and Nightwood, in association with Necessary Angel and Talk is Free), one might reasonably ask what What the Constitution Means to Me means to us. Is this another instance of Canadian theatres producing American or British hits to appeal to their core audiences, even if the material may be slightly dated?

While the first part of that previous sentence has the ring of truth to me, the second half doesn’t: Thanks to a number of intertwining factors, the material feels timely. For this first production outside of the U.S., Shreck has localized the script, so that the focus swings in its final quarter to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This production was timed to run during the American Presidential election (I’m writing this review on Monday, November 4), and the fact that federal politics are also roiling on this side of the border adds a further sense of urgency.

All that said, and despite the surprisingly intimate nature of the material, I found myself more impressed than moved by Constitution. It’s one of those pieces that slowly reveals itself as theatrical premises strip away, and perhaps it’s the extra layers of distance and biography that for me kept the material at an emotional distance.

The play starts with actor Amy Rutherford introducing herself as Schreck; their physical likeness, down to a butter yellow blazer echoing the New York production (costuming by Ellie Koffman), encourages investment in this fiction. She then plays Heidi as a 15-year-old, hitting the debate hard in the American Legion Hall in her hometown of Wenatchee, Washington, observed by a uniformed Legionnaire (Damien Atkins) and an audience coached to understand itself as all-male and only occasionally smoking cigars.

There’s no credited set designer for the Legion Hall, evoked by a back wall of framed photos, red carpet, podium, flag, and a few onstage chairs. Kimberly Purtell’s lighting adds to the institutional atmosphere, warming up as the material gets closer to home.

The debates accomplish one of the play’s central tasks: Charming didacticism. As young Heidi talks her way through key passages, the audience learns about American history and about the ongoing work of citizens and governments to keep the Constitution alive through exchange of views, political action, and amendment.

A key to effective debating, the show tells us, is communicating your personal relationship to the given topic. Shreck embraces this premise by increasingly focusing on issues of women’s bodily autonomy. A discussion of the equal rights supposedly enshrined by Amendment 14 leads her to stories of her great-great-grandmother, who died of melancholia at age 36, having been shipped from Massachusetts to Seattle as a mail-order bride. She tells intimate stories about herself, her mother, and other female relatives, fragile yet indomitable women all. 

About midway through the show, a theatrical layer peels back as Atkins starts playing himself, sharing that his real role is to support Heidi with “positive male energy” as she undertakes this soul-baring. And then another reveal when Rutherford sheds the Heidi guise and we swing into the final Canadianized passage, as real-life high school debater Gabriella King arrives onstage to verbally duke out the Charter with Rutherford.

When performing the show off-Broadway during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, Schreck cried throughout, as did many spectators and critics. As previously noted, the U.S. election makes this a high-stakes moment, nor do we lack things to lose our shit about in Canadian politics and public life (in the Charter debate, Rutherford reminds us that Pierre Poilievre has said he’ll use the federal notwithstanding clause if elected PM). But the balance of the material is such that this production ends up feeling decidedly unfraught. 

Under Weyni Mengesha’s well-paced direction, Rutherford performs with presence, deep empathy, and poise. Atkins and King, too, are well-cast and engaging. When called upon to interact, the opening night audience was warm and game. It was an enjoyable and educational evening of theatre, rather than a searing dive into intimate truths. 

The show’s concept was lightning in a bottle for Schreck. A great potential outcome of this staging could be that a theatremaker of King’s generation grabs hold of the notion of a personal take on political systems and takes it in a new and unforeseen theatrical direction. There’s so much more to explore in what the Charter means to us. 

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What the Constitution Means to Me plays at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts through November 10. Tickets are available here. 

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Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.

WRITTEN BY

Karen Fricker

Karen Fricker is a theatre critic at the Toronto Star, editorial advisor for Intermission magazine, adjunct professor of Dramatic Arts at Brock University, and a member of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association. She previously worked as a critic in London, UK; Dublin, Ireland; and New York City, and has a PhD in theatre studies from Trinity College, Dublin. Her book The Original Stage Productions of Robert Lepage: Making Theatre Global (Manchester University Press) was the winner of the 2022 Canadian Association for Theatre Research’s Ann Saddlemyer Award for the best book in English on a Canadian topic. Her research interests also include contemporary circus and the changing nature of theatre criticism in the digital age.

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