Stream It Or Skip It: ‘What The Constitution Means To Me’ On Amazon Prime Video, A Winning Argument For Civic Engagement

Heidi Schreck’s Broadway ode to the laws that unite America hits notes that resonate in both inspiring and perspiring ways, premiering on Amazon Prime Video the week of the 2020 Tony Award nominations, and less than three weeks before the presidential and congressional elections.

WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Schreck tells us from the jump: “When I was 15 years old, I would travel the country giving speeches about the United States Constitution for prize money. This was a scheme invented by my mom, a debate coach, to help me pay for college.”

And it worked! Hooray! The crowd applauds wildly, to which she quips: “It was 30 years ago, and it was a state school, but thank you.”

Over the course of the next hour and 40 minutes, Schreck will vicariously re-enact her teenage performance that likened the formation of America’s government to a crucible, then show us how much her perspective on our nation’s laws has shifted with additional context not only from the courts but also from her own family’s experiences, and finally give us hope for the future by showcasing two current teen girls from New York City (Rosdely Ciprian and Thursday Williams) who make their own cases for AND against the U.S. Constitution in a live debate against Schreck.

It ran for 183 shows on Broadway, with filming taking place during the final week of the run in August 2019. It won the Obie Award and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play, with Schreck receiving two Tony Award nominations (for Best Play and Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play), and recognition as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

What Specials Will It Remind You Of?: For a play with a lot of emotional wallop, Schreck also manages to keep it moving along, especially in the first half and the finale debate, with plenty of zingers. Then again, her screenwriting credits tilt toward dark comedies, having written TV episodes of I Love Dick, Nurse Jackie, and Billions.

Her passion for political and legal history makes her Broadway show overlap at least a little on the Venn diagram with more direct comedian one-man shows, such as John Leguizamo’s Latin History For Morons, or Colin Quinn’s shows from the past decade (Long Story Short, Unconstitutional, The New York Story, Red State Blue State).

And Schreck takes a page out of the plotting of Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, too, by recognizing she can reclaim her own personal narrative with explicit purpose and passion that perhaps she couldn’t or wouldn’t have thought to realize decades earlier.

Memorable Moments: Of course, Schreck’s re-enactment of her 1989 circuit-winning speech, complete with actor Mike Iveson in the hapless role of an American Legion officer conducting the speech contest stirs the patriotic soul, as does her debate at the end of the show with 14-year-old Rosdely over whether to keep the U.S. Constitution or abolish it and start over.

Iveson himself gets a five-minute showcase to shine in the middle of the show, as he removes the Legion costume and reveals some personal facts and stories from his young adult years.

But by this point, the show has become a testament to and an argument about how America (and the history of the world, even) has largely failed women. Schreck has the stage crew play audio clips from the actual Supreme Court arguments in the landmark 1965 case, Griswold v. Connecticut, which protected the right to privacy when it came to buying birth control — although the portion we hear finds the justices coughing in what Schreck has determined to be guilt over their own personal failings. A later audio clip, from the 2005 case of Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, allowed us to her Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer arguing over the meaning of the word “shall.” Never you mind that the court ruled that local police in Colorado could not be sued for failing to enforce a woman’s restraining order against her estranged husband, which led to him killing their three daughters.

A final audio clip, played at the end of Schreck’s show and before the live debate, features the now late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg telling an interviewer that there’ll be enough women on the Supreme Court “when there are nine.”

Our Take: But that’s really the point, isn’t it.

Schreck starts her show by trumpeting the glories of the U.S. Constitution’s Ninth Amendment and all of the unenumerated rights it contains within its shadows. Or if you’re a fancy judge, its penumbra. She gladly recites the four clauses in section one of the 14th Amendment, which also contain multitudes within such phrases as due process and equal protection under the law.

But gradually, she pulls back the layers on these legal onions to remind us how Black Americans and women and Native Americans and the LGBTQ community have struggled to have those rights applied to them as equally as they’ve been applied to the white male property owners who enacted them into the Constitution in the first place.

That she can trace those struggles directly back through her matriline, from her great-great grandmother, who arrived in Washington State from Germany as a mail-order bride, down to her mother and aunt, and then re-apply them to these legal principles that remain intensely debated to this day, it’s enough to make her laugh and cry, and us as well.

One moment Schreck’s wailing in a nod to her great-great grandmother’s melancholia, the next she’s dancing across the stage acting out her grandma’s log-rolling down the river. “This is my favorite thing to do in the whole show!” he announces.

She can joke of Scalia’s claim that “he couldn’t tell you what the Ninth Amendment meant if his life depended on it,” adding after a beat, “which I guess, his didn’t!” And if you’re following the news, you can immediately think of Amy Coney Barrett, who proudly clerked for Scalia, now just as proudly claiming her right to not know the answers to Senate committee questions this week in her bid to replace Ginsburg on the highest court in our land.

No wonder, even in 2019, Schreck would find herself stopping to pause in several places, as much to catch herself as to create dramatic tension, before acknowledging “I find it harder and harder to talk about (the 14th Amendment) every day.” Not just emotionally, but also physically, as the stress and anxiety of remembering and reciting even just the troubles her maternal ancestors have experienced manifests itself in aches and pains throughout her own body, too.

And she has come to learn from legal scholars how rights can be written out in negative or positive terms. Either to protect us from the government (negative rights) or to force the government to provide for us (positive rights). Her passion now comes from realizing that the U.S. Constitution, despite being perhaps the oldest still standing, also stands alone among the 180 worldwide for not explicitly protecting its citizens because of their gender. And even if we ripped it up and wrote a new union, who would get to decide what’s in it, and who would interpret its meaning for the rest of us?

They’re questions designed to linger with us, to inspire our own debates, and perhaps lead us to get involved in the civic process.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Halfway through the show, Schreck jokes: “In spite of how it feels, and apparently what some people think, this play is so carefully constructed. It’s not my fault if you can’t see the structures.” Even if you have trouble reading between the lines, the closing debates with Rosdely and Thursday (the latter of whom appears only in the credits, as well as bonus footage) make me remain hopeful for our future as a nation.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch What the Constitution Means to Me on Amazon Prime Video