112
IT’S OFTEN SAID that the upside of
dark times is that they produce great
art. “I would much prefer to have
bad art and live in good times,” says
the writer and actor Heidi Schreck.
Coming from her, this assertion is a bit
rich—and Schreck knows it, laughing
at her own words. We’re meeting at a
café near Manhattan’s Helen Hayes
Theater, where her extraordinary play,
What the Constitution Means to Me,
has been holding audiences rapt, both
a critical and word-of-mouth hit.
Over the last two-plus years—not
uncoincidentally the span of the
45th presidency—the show has mi-
grated from a tiny downtown theater
to California’s Berkeley Rep to Broad-
way, with the latest production earning
Schreck an Obie award for Best New
American Play and two Tony Award
nominations. As boisterous and open-
hearted offstage as she is on-, Schreck
can’t suppress a watery reddening of
her eyes as she considers the impact
that her show has had. “I get a lot of
women who come back a second or
third time and bring their daughters
or mothers,” she says. “I never thought
I’d be getting whole families!”
A de facto one-woman production,
with only a couple of strategically
timed walk-ons by other perform-
ers, it finds Schreck doing aloud what
many of us have, of late, been doing in
the privacy of our own minds: ques-
tioning the bedrock assumptions
that we have long held dear about
the United States of America. In the
play, the 47-year-old Schreck recon-
siders her childhood as an oratorical
prodigy from Wenatchee, Washing-
ton, who won speaking competitions
by exalting the U.S. Constitution.
On a set decorated to resemble the
wood-paneled American Legion halls
in which she competed as a youth,
Schreck comes to the conclusion that
her teenage crush—the 1787 docu-
ment—maybe isn’t so dreamy after
Heidi Schreck
The play wright
is giving a whole new
meaning to
political theater.
By David K amp.
front of the Obamas because she had
recently won the National Portrait
Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait
Competition, a contest open to any
professional artist working in the Unit-
ed States. She is the first woman and
the first African American to win it.
Sherald’s painting of the former
First Lady is larger than life and glo-
riously untraditional. Michelle sits
facing us, chin resting on one hand,
arms bare, rising from a mountainous,
floor-length white skirt with geometric
patterns in black, red, pink, and yellow.
But the critical response was mixed.
New York Times art critic Holland
Cotter thought the dress outperformed
the person. He wrote, “Mrs. Obama’s
face... could be almost anyone’s
face, like a model’s face in a fashion
spread.” New York Magazine’s Jer-
ry Saltz disagreed.
“She is grand, ele-
gant, gorgeous, but
her jackrabbit-quick
wit is right there.”
The most indelible
reaction came from
two-year-old Parker
Curry, who was pho-
tographed stand-
ing in front of the
painting, a look of
awed enchantment
on her face. “She’s a
queen,” Parker told her mother; her
reaction, and the painting itself, went
viral. To me, the image captures not
only the power and spirit of the sub-
ject, but also the hope and promise that
Michelle Obama embodies, and art’s
ability to encompass that.
With a mile-wide smile and a warm
hug, Sherald lets me into her Jersey
City studio in Mana Contemporary,
the two-million-square-foot former
tobacco factory that’s now a hive of
artist spaces. She introduces me to
August Wilson, her Pekingese–Jack
Russell: “He’s the perfect balance of
a dog,” she says as she prepares him
a plate of grain–and–gluten free din-
ner patties. “Most Jack Russells are a
little neurotic, kind of hyper. But he’s
really chill.”
The studio is divided into three
rooms, one of which is lined with can-
vases in various stages of development.
Kelli Ryan, her studio assistant, is busy
priming the two biggest ones (about
ten feet tall, the largest she’s ever done)
with Napthol Scarlet. “It’s my base,”
she explains. “Somebody told me this
is what the Old Masters did, and I like
the way it warms up the whole image
when I paint over it.” The paintings
are all headed for her debut solo show
next month in New York at Hauser
& Wirth, the mega-gallery that now
represents her worldwide. Ever since
The Portrait, Sherald’s mother, Ger-
aldine, who never thought she could
survive as an artist, has been “driving
the bandwagon,” Sherald tells me with
an affectionate laugh. “She says, ‘I al-
ways knew my daughter was going to
be an amazing artist.’ ”
Two slightly smaller paintings
are further along. Each one shows
a standing woman looking straight
at us, in a colorfully patterned dress.
They both have the
same dark-gray
skin tone—a mix-
ture of black and
Naples Yellow—
that Sherald gives to
all her subjects. “It
feels more powerful
than if I painted the
skin brown,” she
says. Half a dozen
photographs are
pinned to a wall.
“This guy is an
Alvin Ailey dancer,” she says. “This
one is Keoma, August’s nanny and
dog-walker, and this is a guy I met
on the subway.”
She recently moved to New Jersey,
she explains, “for love.” Last Sep-
tember she began living with Kevin
Pemberton, a Brooklyn-born hedge
funder, in a house that’s a short drive
from Mana Contemporary. A mutual
friend introduced them ten years ago,
but nothing clicked until last year. “I
hated to leave Baltimore, because my
heart is there,” she says. “But his career
is not portable.” They go out a lot—
Kevin likes to try new restaurants.
They also love to go salsa dancing, and
to the American Ballet Theatre and the
Metropolitan Opera, where they re-
cently saw the South African soprano
Pretty Yende in La Fille du Régiment.
The other night they went to Shake-
speare in the Park and saw an all-black
cast in Much Ado About Nothing. “It’s
amazing to walk into these spaces,”
she says, CONTINUED ON PAGE 145
“I’m not going to
take myself too
seriously, because
I realize it just
kind of happened.
I worked hard, and
this is a fun ride”
