What The Constitution Means To Me at BCT

Or: Out of the Penumbra

I have a particular fondness for shows that are acts of storytelling. What the Constitution Means to Me originated as Heidi Schreck’s march back to a facet to her childhood, when she would travel around the country doing rhetoric competitions for the American Legion, on the Constitution and her family. “It’s kind of like a crime scene drawing,” she says, referencing the legion hall she’s conjured for her audience. She has returned to her fifteen year old self to uncover the threads of her own life, her family, and place in an America that espouses to protect and champion liberty and justice for all but doesn’t, or maybe never has, delivered.

At Boise Contemporary Theater, Schreck is represented by Tracy Sunderland, who is well known and much beloved for her stillness and wryness and the showing passion not as tempest but as a deep, deep well that draws an audience closer to its rim. Her skill in both dealing humor and showing horror (and balancing an all embracing weariness) fit neatly in the play as, under the authority of the Legionnaire (Ben Clegg) she takes us through Schreck’s odyssey with the same authenticity as if it were her own.

Director Jessica Ires Morris makes no bones of the fact that the reading stretches a new skin over Schreck’s life. Sunderland and Clegg and Alma Ceja (a Boise State University Debating Champion, brought in for the showdown at the plays end), make any asides to introduce themselves and their own, partial integration into the parts they present. They are also very upfront about updating the statistics from when the play was first publish, as well as drawing attention to more recent pertaining to the Constitution and the Supreme Court.

Still, however more pointed and even more contentious the present may be, Schreck’s script is one for the ages. Though delivered in an offhand, personal, constellation connecting manner, the script snaps tight and draws us through the story where no side story about a disputed fact of a beloved sock monkey is mere decoration. “There are no tangents,” Sutherland declares, and damn if she isn’t right. It’s a script that’s rich with pockets of sweet honey, delightful images, bursts or humor and at the same time is studded over with sharp teeth that draw blood. There are parts of this play, that have stuck like nails in me from when I first heard it, that lose none of their sting or their pain to hear again.

This is a cri de coeur, which while couched in Schreck’s language and history, resonates in Sunderland and anyone who sees the American promise, the hope for progress, equality, and protection flaking away, and begins to understand (or has always known) that the Constitution has failed untold millions (and, it could be argued, is specifically designed for their disenfranchisement).

In the spirit of its conception, the play ends with a debate on the merits, and future, of our founding document. There’s no rallying call, no ten step plan to salvation. Only a testimony of courage, an announcement that something in our society is broken and needs splinting, and the dedication, in spite of everything, to proceed with hope and eloquence. A story that deserves telling, and telling widely.