Ross Zentner
Colleen Madden in "What the Constitution Means to Me."
Colleen Madden, playing a middle-aged Heidi, 'dominates the stage.'
Political theater and formal debate sit in a middle ground between earnest persuasion and point-scoring performance. In What the Constitution Means To Me, this zone is called a “penumbra,” a term used in constitutional law to represent muddled inferences between clearly stated lines, and the play operates in a similarly shadowy place.
Originally written and performed as an autobiographical work by Heidi Schreck, What the Constitution Means To Me, presented by Forward Theater at the Overture Center Playhouse through April 21, features a middle-aged Heidi (Colleen Madden) revisiting the touring performer days of her youth.
Her circuit: American Legion halls holding cash prize contests for students with a silver tongue and a firm grasp on the United States Constitution. Barely hidden beneath the surface of these recollections are decades of Heidi’s resentments, disappointments and despair. She takes the stage not to authentically recreate her teenage stump speech full of trite talking points about the Constitution. She instead advances a new proposition: that women have been failed by the Constitution, by subsequent Constitutional law, and ultimately by America itself.
Madden dominates the stage, gliding between present-day Heidi and a half-remembered representation of Heidi at age 15. Madden deftly advances Schreck’s case through an organized portfolio of personal anecdotes, historical recordings, and no small helping of harrowing statistics and tales of abuse. In its closing moments, the play abandons both Heidi personas and leaves Madden purporting to speak for herself.
Casem AbuLughod shares the stage with Madden, taking three roles. The first is a deliberately flat, taciturn Legionnaire judging young Heidi’s speeches (and occasionally the elder Heidi’s political positions). Later, AbuLughod sheds his blazer, untucks his shirt, and becomes the affably gentle “Danny,” an actor and Heidi’s friend. AbuLughod proficiently does what Schreck designed this character to do: precisely what he is told, and nothing more. When Heidi goes on a tangent, she gloats that the Legionnaire cannot interrupt her, because she has given him no dialogue. As Danny, when he monologues about his nurturing masculinity (complete with crying over synchronized swimming), Heidi beams with pride of ownership in the positivity and goodness AbuLughod ably manifests.
Lisa Schlenker’s scenic design presents an American Legion hall reinterpreted as a throwback cardboard diorama, and gives the small cast ample opportunities to roam. Noele Stollmack’s lighting design helps guide the audience through the several phases of half-remembered past and present days, and draws attention to the sea of white male authority figure portraits hanging high above the stage as needed to stoke ire.
Heidi tells us several times that she’s tired, fed up, and sometimes feels so beaten down by being a woman in 21st century America that all she can do is cry. We see that in Madden’s performance, and we believe her. Heidi is a middle child of Generation X, a cohort notoriously outnumbered by both older and younger generations. She sees for women a landscape worse today than the unsatisfactory decades she grew up in, and a dwindling horizon for her own influence.
The play culminates with a debate. A present-day high school debater (Caroline Talis, giving an eyes-and-energy performance as reviewed; Alliae Krueger takes the role on alternating dates) challenges Madden to a debate on the proposition “Should we abolish the U.S. Constitution?”
This exposes one of the rough patches created by not having Schreck herself in the lead role. As originally conceived, this moment would have tension and intrigue: the once-mighty debate student, out of practice for decades, gears up for one final debate — with America’s fate in the balance.
But at this point in Forward’s production, “Heidi” is no longer on stage. Madden has shed her outer layers and told the audience that she is in fact a popular, prolific performer named Colleen, and the audience has no reason to see her as a skilled debater or student of Constitutional law. This strips both stakes and motivation from the showdown. (Curiously, AbuLughod gets no equal moment to reveal his true identity as he shifts from Danny’s ultra-gentle persona to his final form as improv comedy debate moderator, exhorting the audience to boo and cheer as the debate begins.)
The dialogue, however, elevates the newcomer to superstar status. Schreck isn’t looking for a sparring partner to share one last energetic debate. She’s running out of steam in a relay race of advocacy, hoping desperately to hand off the baton to someone with fresh legs.
The play — after spending more than an hour on appeals for stronger protection for women’s rights — pivots to endorse various youth demands including a Constitutional initiative on climate change, with no real examination of how to achieve that or how the Constitution can even be held to account for such a project. But at least the shift has the patina of youthful purity, and that’s enough of a lifeline for Schreck in her inescapable moment of overwhelmed exhaustion.
