The United States Constitution was written 239 years ago, its longevity a point of pride and a dilemma. It’s a product of a worldview far from today’s, and even if its goals were lofty, those objectives require interpretation. Heidi Schreck’s spitfire play What the Constitution Means to Me uses stimulating theatrical techniques to demonstrate a political document’s formidable impact on personal lives.
Lost Nation Theater’s energetic production engages the audience in questions about women’s rights, immigration, male violence and U.S. history, but this is no dry lecture or partisan argument. The playwright puts herself onstage and navigates the gulf between the high-minded ambitions behind our governing document and the actual results in our social history.
The play premiered in 2017, with Schreck appearing as herself in an explicitly autobiographical story that earned the 2019 Best American Play award from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. In this production, the powerhouse Kianna Bromley portrays Heidi’s funny, tragic, enlightening and absolutely riveting quest to communicate exactly what her play’s title says.
In high school, Heidi toured American Legion halls in an oratory contest, and the play puts her back behind the podium, with a decorated Legionnaire clicking a stopwatch to time her. Her speeches are framed by the present-day Heidi, looking back from her mid-forties. Almost every word is addressed to the audience in the form of oratory, confession, aside, narration or extempore comment.
From the outset, Heidi’s direct address forges a dialogue with viewers. A preshow constitutional trivia game gets us responding to questions posed by the warm, dedicated Michael Halloran, the actor who will play the Legionnaire and, later, a fourth-wall puncturing version of himself.
Wearing a butterscotch blazer and a wide smile, the young Heidi aims to please roomfuls of cigar-smoking men who will decide if her speech wins her college scholarship money. As she grows up, Constitution conveys Heidi’s arc from idealism to disillusionment and the story of every American who looked to this document for protection and couldn’t find it. Yet it also demonstrates the power of persuasion and protest, because that’s what Heidi’s words to us ultimately are.
Schreck writes bravely about her 15-year-old self, a kid passionate about justice but young enough to believe the fairness of the constitution acts upon society like a force field. She fantasizes she could persuade a murderer or a rapist to spare her by reminding him that they’re equals.
Heidi’s direct address forges a dialogue with viewers.
Her naïveté is the fuel that powers youth; later, another kind of courage arises. What Heidi couldn’t face in high school was the history of domestic abuse in four generations of her own family. She weaves those stories around the constitution’s huge hole — it offers no legal protections for women.
The adult Heidi rockets across the stage sporting a T-shirt of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in an ironic crown plus iconic lace collar. In the course of her life, Heidi has seen the constitution fail so many people — women, immigrants, every minority, Native Americans. But the play delivers no rants. It’s one small observation at a time. The impact comes as we connect the dots Heidi points to, laugh at her observations and learn of her family tragedies.
At the Legion hall, young Heidi’s analysis of the 14th Amendment bubbles with a teenager’s awe as she describes justice William O. Douglas performing the magic trick of legalizing contraception by finding the right to privacy lurking in the document. With her eye on the prize of that scholarship money, she doesn’t want to sound too enthusiastic about women’s rights, but in the 1980s, constitutional interpretation appears ready to absorb feminism.
Older Heidi breaks out of the frame to describe the 1965 Supreme Court Griswold decision with a damning audiotape of tense male justices coughing and sidestepping the reality of reproduction and its impact on women. They may have been embarrassed, but Heidi tells us that several of the justices were cheating on their wives at the time and might very well have appreciated a provision preventing unwelcome pregnancies.
The play weaves together four simultaneous perspectives: an adolescent, an adult, an individual, a member of society. Schreck’s playwriting structure appears rambling and free-form — there are anecdotes that take too long — but ultimately, the shifts in perspective avoid didacticism and kindle the audience’s own reflections.
When Heidi talks about male violence, she offers grim statistics, plus the story of what her Grandma Bea suffered from a violent second husband, and then her own experience as a first-year college student when a senior was quick to assume she was available for anything he wanted. We see, over time, multiple facets of the stark power imbalance between the sexes.
The show concludes with a debate between the adult Heidi and a real-life 14-year-old student from U-32 Middle & High School, Josephine Taylor. Taylor is composed, earnest and an extremely encouraging face of the future. She’s the contemporary version of young Heidi, with the greater maturity and gloomier prospects of a student in 2026. Taylor and Bromley take opposite sides on the matter that is subtly in dispute throughout the play: Should we keep or abolish the constitution? The document’s flaws grow still clearer in the debate, but so do its possibilities.
Each moment of the play feels spontaneous, with Heidi pulling her recollections together before our eyes and the debate showing two people improvising to formulate ideas. The energy of Bromley’s performance underscores the importance of Heidi’s exploration.
The constitution mentioned in the news is usually someone’s justification for something to support or oppose, and the discussion magnifies antagonism. In What the Constitution Means to Me, all thoughts deserve respect. Heidi’s way of addressing the audience is a model of the honesty, humor and individuality that might just prevent democracy from ebbing away. And the conversations she starts don’t have to end when we leave the theater. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “We the People | Theater review: What the Constitution Means to Me, Lost Nation Theater”
This article appears in October 7 • 2026.
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