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When actor and writer Heidi Schreck was a high school student in Wenatchee, Wash., she was racking up college tuition money by giving speeches on the majesty of the Constitution in contests organized by the American Legion.
Pick an Amendment and this self-described teenage zealot could deliver an impassioned address on its democratic superpower. Start the clock and hear her deliver a defense of this founding document’s magical ability to correct its blind spots over time.
In “What the Constitution Means to Me,” the singularly charming, politically urgent and cathartically necessary play that had its official Broadway opening Sunday at the Helen Hayes Theater, Schreck tries to re-create from memory the prize-winning speech she gave as a 15-year-old. But that’s just the setup for a delightfully free-form theatrical experience.
This unconventional work is a hybrid creation, part play, part performance piece. The production, directed by Oliver Butler, brings into frolicsome dialogue an adult woman’s consciousness of contemporary fractured America with a youthful idealism that valiantly refuses to concede defeat.
On a set designed by Rachel Hauck to resemble an American Legion hall, Schreck jumps back in time to 1989 to remember the adolescent girl whose overheated rhetoric and giddy metaphors betray an obsession with the Salem witch trials and Patrick Swayze. Behind this fervid style is an incisive mind with a passionate commitment to the principle of equality, which from the nation’s beginning has been a source of endless controversy.
Schreck sends up her own goofy earnestness as she excitedly takes the microphone in a setting that includes a couple of flags, a sad potted plant and, as a stand-in for...