With weeks until the 2024 presidential election, Stage West Theatre opens its 2024-2025 season with a play and a debate about America’s celebrated founding document. Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me runs at the Fort Worth theatre through November 3.
“It’s such a celebration of democracy,’ said Dana Schultes, Stage West’s Executive Producer and director of the show.
Stage West’s production is the regional premiere of this Pulitzer Prize finalist. The Tony-nominated show and Obie Award winner for Best New American Play is the most produced play in America. Schultes hopes it will get people talking.
“Live theatre is a way to bring people together for conversation and so when you have an opportunity to prompt civic engagement, I find it to be a responsibility as a theater-maker if there’s something that does that to engage with it,” Schultes said.
Get top local stories in DFW delivered to you every morning. >Sign up for NBC DFW's News Headlines newsletter.
During this contentious political moment, this play focuses on the foundational concept of American society and what kind of nation Americans want in the future.
“This particular play eschews a lot of the noise,” Schultes said. “Those are things that steal our conversation when there are things that perhaps if we would collectively look more deeply at systemic issues that really do have meaningful widespread impact, we could work together to think about what we want our society to look like.”
The play centers on Heidi who as a high schooler put herself though college by winning debate competitions about the Constitution. As an adult, Heidi revisits the impact of the founding document on her life. Megan Noble plays Heidi.
The Scene
“It really is a memory play in many ways,” Noble said. “It’s that excitement of going back to that time and ‘What did I love about the Constitution?’ and ‘What did it mean to me back then?’ and then starting to ask questions of, ‘Wow, I saw things this way, but now that I’m older and these things happened and I have more information and I also have more life experience, I now see things a little differently.’ And without saying this is the way, it’s her working through that. It’s her curiosity and fascination with how her history relates to her present moment.”
The play shows Heidi’s evolving perspective of history.
“There is an innocent look at the world that she just accepted what she was told as fact and made connections because that was what she was taught in school, but not necessarily digging deep because of her own trauma in her past,” Noble said. “As she gets older, there is this, ‘As I weave in my own personal experience and allow that to impact the way I see history, I am now a little bit gutted by the fact that by looking truth squarely in the face, I now unveiled a whole world of truth I denied the existence of as a 15-year-old.’”
The second part of the play is a debate between a local teenage debater and the adult Heidi. The audience will select the winner.
“It’s interesting because it is an actual debate,” Schultes said. “It is: ‘Should we abolish the Constitution or not?’ That’s it. It’s live. It’s fresh. We don’t know who’s going to debate which side each night.”
Through working on the show, Noble engaged with history in a way that she did not when she was a student, becoming an inquisitive mother of four sons.
“It’s been very meaningful for me and makes me ask my boys, ‘What are you learning in history?’” Noble said.
For Schultes, the play sparks a conversation about how well the Constitution represents women and minority populations and what that lack of representation means for American society nearly 250 years since its founding. She is excited that her teenage daughter is bringing friends to the show.
“Every time that I engage with it, it pulls back another layer of something I haven’t really considered before,” Schultes said. “There are things that are brought up in this play that sort of shake my foundation as a human being and I am so very much wanting to share them with other people so other people can think about what it means.”
What the Constitution means to Noble is complicated.
“I’m conflicted about the Constitution. The people who made it were flawed human beings and there is so much good that has come from it. At the same time, it is incomplete. I do not feel represented as a woman in that document. There is still not an equal rights amendment, which is hard to believe,” Noble said. “It is a thorough document, but it lacks what Heidi talks about in the play as active rights, protecting all people on the planet.”
More than two centuries later, Benjamin Franklin’s wisdom remains relevant.
“The Constitution, to me, is our best chance for continued democracy for all of us living in America – if we can keep it,” Schultes said.
Learn more: Stage West
