A Funny Feminist Look at U.S. Constitution

Repertory Theater presents What the Constitution Means to Me in the Stiemke Studio February 6 – March 17, 2024. Pictured: Maya O’Day-Biddle, William Mobley, Jessie Fisher. Photo by Michael Brosilow.

The title of the Milwaukee Rep’s current offering at the Stiemke Studio stage couldn’t be more timely and yet sound duller than school detention (which it isn’t) – What the Constitution Means to Me.

Largely comedic in style, it opened two days after a real audio event (involving Section 3 of the 14th Amendment as decided by Colorado) caught the nine justices on the US Supreme Court searching for an escape hatch. But no, the play doesn’t deal with that still troublesome Section 3. It focuses within the play on the earlier sections of the 14th that have helped the cause of minorities and voting rights.

The power and the built-in antiquities of the Constitution are indeed the main topic of the play, which offers patrons a program, an allusion-explaining audience guide and a pocketbook copy of the Constitution.

That goes with a first half that feels like a friendly parlor game as the audience is invited into memories. It ends with some friendly audience involvement and a teenage debater chosen from a trio of area high school students cast by the Rep. (Opening night fell to Whitnall High junior Maya O’Day-Biddle.) The play has a fascinating work history including a Broadway run and honors (both Pulitzer and Tony nominations) for the playwright, Heidi Schreck, who originated the main part based on her teenage life.

Here actress Jessie Fisher, with deft timing and an antic clownish face, plays Heidi and captivates the audience with her charisma. She has to work a bit harder than she did a few years ago at the Rep’s production of Grounded.

Another personable actor with good timing, Will Mobley, morphs from Legion timekeeper into a much-needed sympathetic male character – the only sympathetic male in the piece.

The start is heavy on the physical humor of a teen confronting herself decades later. Then the insights turn more serious as Heidi looks back some 30 years at her 15-year-old self who loved Dirty Dancing and paid her way through college by regularly winning the American Legion constitutional debates (yes there really were such things).

Having spent too much of my life at events in American Legion halls, I enjoyed set designer Collette Pollard’s impish functional background with chairs and lectern dotted by trophies, lacquered plates and posters – a down-home Americana feel that says much about the tone of the story.

The tougher last half stretches for meaning and tests the two good actors’ likeability as they seek anecdotes and connections out of sometimes predictable storytelling. Director Laura Braza focused on the pace and giving the actors room to laugh at each other, but the writing does not hold up under close examination. A lot of effort and good polemics are being spent on a worthy topic in an on-again, off-again play.

The grown-up Heidi sheds both her jacket and her teen self to tell stories about abusive men, her family’s upbringing before and after the Bill of Rights — and the evolution and almost correctives of the Constitution she once blindly embraced.

The play was written when Roe vs Wade was still enforced and includes an audience-rousing audio from the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Much of the appeal of the piece is how Heidi, now an older survivor in a man’s world, looks back inside the document she once treasured and is troubled by what she sees there – and doesn’t see there, since “woman” is never mentioned. The play is balanced between feminist despair of what the Constitution failed to mean and feminist hope for what it still could mean.

Through March 17 at the Milwaukee Rep’s Stiemke Studio Theater. Purchase tickets here.

What the Constitution Means to Me Gallery

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Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blogs here and here.