46 SMITHSONIAN.COM | December 2019
was when she posed herself the challenge that her 15-year-
old self was given during those contests—fi nd a personal
connection between her life and the Constitution—that the
work grew into a kind of feminist deconstruction of the na-
tion’s founding document. (Schreck’s earlier work, Grand
Concourse, featuring a soup kitchen in the Bronx as its set-
ting, garnered a Lilly Award in 2015 for best new play; she is
also a screenwriter whose credits include the television series
“Nurse Jackie” and “I Love Dick.”)
What the Constitution Means “sort of took its own shape,”
she said. “I felt as if the play led me.” Schreck, who was briefl y
on a prelaw track in college before English and theater swept
her away, turned herself into something of a constitutional
expert, taking a deep dive into the mind-set of the men who
wrote the Constitution, who was left out of it and how it has
been shaped over time. In the play, she talks quite a bit about
the Ninth Amendment, which says simply ,
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of cer-
tain rights, shall not be construed to deny or
disparage others retained by the people.” Or,
as she puts it onstage, the Constitution doesn’t
guarantee you the right to brush your teeth, but
that doesn’t mean you don’t have that right.
(The Ninth Amendment has helped secure, for
instance, the right to use birth control.)
She enlarges, too, on the concept of nega-
tive rights versus positive rights—things that
the government is expressly forbidden to in-
fringe upon versus things that are proactively
guaranteed. She studied up on the consti-
tutions of other nations that have a greater
emphasis on positive rights than does the
U.S. Constitution. South Africa, for instance,
guarantees the right to human dignity, and to
a healthy environment.PEND SOME MONEY on your way out of a Broad-
way theater and you can leave with an over-
priced mug or T-shirt. Heidi Schreck sent peo-
ple home from her show with a souvenir that
is arguably much more valuable, and at no
charge: a pocket-size copy of the United States Constitution.
Anyone who saw Schreck’s play, What the Constitution
Means to Me, during its fi ve-month Broadway run or on one of
its tour stops will surely never think of the country’s founding
document the same way again.
If the play’s title sounds like something from a high school
speech contest, there’s a reason for that: It was born of
Schreck’s experiences as a teenager at Wenatchee High School
in Washington in the 1980s, when she competed in American
Legion oratorical contests. She won enough money doing so
to pay for college at the University of Oregon.
In the play, Schreck, who both wrote and starred in it, wry-
ly recreates what she has described as her “teenage girl’s bad
romance with the Constitution.” From that rather adorable
premise she embarks on a far-reaching examination of how
the Constitution has applied—or not applied—to several gen-
erations of women in her family.
She talks about the marginalization of women and other
demographic groups, about domestic violence
and sexual abuse. She calls out the founders
and later interpreters of the Constitution for
their male-centric view of the world, in her
groundbreaking analysis of what she sees as a
living document that can evolve with our times.
Schreck began working on the play in 2007,
when she was living in Brooklyn, and per-
formed a brief monologue at P.S. 122, an al-
ternative-theater space in Manhattan’s East
Village, about her teenage debating experienc-
es. “I really started from the tiny spark that so
many plays start from,” she told me in an in-
terview this past September, shortly after the
play closed on Broadway and was beginning a
run at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
“I certainly didn’t have a grand idea.”
Encouraged by the response to her initial
eff ort, she set about expanding the piece. It
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