PART ONE: THE CONTEST
Heidi addresses the audience from ‘out of frame’ and thanks the audience for their attendance. She recalls being fifteen and competing in debate competitions for prize money as a way to pay for college. Her younger self loved the US Constitution, zealously, and wanted to try to remember why, so she decided to try and resurrect one of her prize-winning speeches. She steps into the frame of the set. She explains that ‘we are in an American Legion hall in Wenatchee, Washington,’ and that what the viewer sees is a reconstruction from memory.
Becky Lee Dobbler was one of her competitors, and was good at drawing parallels between her personal life and the Constitution. Heidi wasn’t as good at this because she was pretty emotionally guarded and she didn’t want to talk about her grandmother. She recalls that the debates took place in front of men and asks the audience to stand in as the men while she assumes the mantle of her fifteen year old self.
We are in 1989. An American Legionnaire enters from the back of the house and makes his way to the stage. He briefly introduces the contest and asks the audience to not clap, take pictures, or record video. He also asks that pagers be silenced except for those held by doctors, and makes a joke that doctors may be needed during the contest. He explains part one of the contest features the contestants delivering a prepared 7 minute speech and part two requires each to draw an extemporaneous parallel between their own lives and whatever amendment they are randomly assigned. The goal is to give the contestants an idea of what it might be like arguing in front of the Supreme Court. He adds that tonight’s contestants are Becky Lee Dobbler with her speech “The Constitution is a Patchwork Quilt” and Heidis Schreck with her speech “Casting Spells: The Crucible of the Constitution.”
Heidi begins her prepared speech, calling the Constitution beautiful, living, and steamy; comparing it to a crucible or witch’s cauldron. She thanks the Legionnaires for their service and the scholarship money, then pivots to explain a fantasy in which a murderer or rapist decides not to inflict his crime upon her because she would make him understand that she is a human being by saying, “No. Think about this for a moment. Just like you, I am a human being” (17). She draws a parallel between that story and the story of how the Constitution was drafted by “magicians” who, instead of killing each other, “performed a collective act of ethical visualization” (17). That the document isn’t perfect, but it can be amended.
Heidi launches into describing Amendment 9, it’s her favorite because it says that although a right isn’t in the Constitution, that doesn’t mean you don’t have it. Because the Constitution itself doesn’t know all of the rights you have. She recounts that Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas used the word “penumbra” when discussing the 9th Amendment and she then defines it for the audience as a “space of partial illumination” (18). She finishes her speech by saying that she loves the 9th Amendment so much because it leaves room for the future self, adding poignant, “And we just have to hope we don’t drown in the process of figuring out what that is” (19).
She says to the audience that she loved the part where they’d pick an amendment to speak about extemporaneously – for one thing it was exciting, and for another, it was a good way for her to connect with her dad and forget for a while that she was navigating puberty back then.
She draws the 14th Amendment, which has 4 sections, but she will only address Section 1. Heidi recites the words of the amendment, and then explains how it helped the American Civil Rights Movement, pointing out that the amendment gave rights only to Black men and not the women. In fact, women were explicitly excluded with the addition of the words “males” in this amendment. Clause 1 overturned Dred Scott v Sanford which ruled that no person of African ancestry could become a US citizen. However, the clause fails to protect Native Americans and immigrants. Her great-great-mother was an immigrant that was wanted because women were needed to balance the male-to-female ratio in Washington state; nevertheless she died before becoming a citizen.
Clause 2, she describes, affords US citizens the right to travel freely and buy property in any State. Turning again to her great-great-grandmother, she expounds on Asa Mercer and how he schemed to bring women from the East Coast to the Pacific North West, promising them “free and independent lives” (25). Mercer collected $300 from men who wanted brides and then secured a ship from General Grant to ferry the women across. Grimly, once on the ship, the women realized that this was a lie and tried to get off in Chile, only to be held captive and forced to finish the journey. Her own great-great-grandmother, Theresa, was purchased for $75.
Theresa is said to have died of “Melancholia,” and Heidi wonders if she has inherited chemical depression. She describes, and subsequently demonstrates, “Greek Tragedy Crying” as the only way she can cry – with howling and wailing as one would in a Greek tragedy. In fact, some of her ex-boyfriends broke up with her because of her “aggressive” crying. She reasons that it’s no wonder Theresa died of melancholia when women of her time encountered such violence from their husbands; she then recites headlines from the Cowlitz County Register, including, “Husband Stomps Wife’s Face with Spiked Logging Boots.”
Clause 3 was at the heart of the Roe v Wade case, which granted a woman the right to abortion care because it found that a doctor and their patient have a right to privacy. She confides in the audience of her own story of getting pregnant and how she pursued and secured her own abortion, not wanting to give up her plans to teach English in Russia. Living in a small town prohibited her from going to Planned Parenthood, so she had to go to an “unmarked building” for privacy. The office turned out to be an anti-abortion care clinic, so she made up a story of going on vacation to Eugene, OR, with her boyfriend so that she could covertly acquire abortion care. She knew it was legal and her right to obtain one and recounts that it was also “technically legal for the first hundred years we were a country” (31). Heidi recalls all of the celebrities who she knew had had abortions and describes the abortion subplot of Dirty Dancing. She was on the birth control pill when she got pregnant and had been since age 15; thanks to Griswold v Connecticut which legalized birth control. There are “nine men deciding the fate of birth control,” she says, adding that the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court didn’t take her seat until 1981.
Heidi asks Terri to play a sound clip from Griswold v Connecticut. The Justices seem to be very flustered and having difficulty speaking. Even though birth control became legal under that case in 1965, it was only for married women; single women weren’t afforded birth control until 1972. Heidi is thinking about all of this on the way to being dropped off to her boyfriend, and she suddenly feels nauseated. She throws up on the side of the road and her mom, who was driving, says, “You better not be pregnant!” and Heidi shouts, “I’M NOT PREGNANT!” (35).
It is here that Heidi decides to no longer play her 15-year-old self saying, “I’m just gonna go ahead and be myself all the time now. … a grown woman in my mid-forties” (35-36). She continues describing how the 14th Amendment was used to help find gender and sexual-orientation based discrimination and violence, and then recites statistics that illustrate the pervasiveness of violence against women and girls including: “One in four girls will be sexually abused before they turn eighteen” (37).
Heidi tells the story of her Grandma Betty, who was married to a good man, “… meaning he didn’t beat up his wife and kids” (38), but that he died and Betty remarried a very violent man. Betty’s second husband raped and impregnated Heidi’s aunt twice. She assures the audience that most of her extended family, Grandma Betty’s children, turned out “mostly okay.” At this point, the Legionnaire starts to become more of “her ally and assistant” (40).
Hearing the story for the first time at 15, Heidi felt furious at her mother because, “I did not want to think that they [men] could be violent” (40). It is then that she learns about Battered Woman Syndrome and how, despite Betty’s strength and stature, she couldn’t leave. Heidi had wanted to tell Grandma Betty about the pregnancy but didn’t want a repeat of her mother’s reaction. Instead she asked for another sock monkey, after loving the first one so ardently that it was destroyed. Betty sewed and sent another sock monkey all the way to Siberia the following Christmas, which Schreck named George the Second. Heidi bought another sock monkey to be George II’s friend, and despite being married, this third sock monkey, she says, is “the most important person in my life” (42).
Castle Rock v Gonzales, she describes, was a case in which a woman who had a restraining order against her abusive ex-husband couldn’t compel the police to recover her children after the man had kidnapped them. He killed them and Jessica Gonzales took the case to the Supreme Court who ruled that she had no right to police protection in this case; Schreck points out that this is because the Constitution is primarily a negative rights document. She plays a clip of the hearing in which Justices Scalia and Breyer quibble over the word “shall.” Schreck clarifies that she doesn’t hate men, rather she loves them, but that it’s true that the Constitution doesn’t offer protection against violence men inflict on women.
Heidi recounts that after the first rehearsal of a college play she was cast in, a boy in the cast offered to give her a ride home. He said he wanted to kiss her, and did… then he took off her pants and she says she isn’t sure if she decided to have sex with him or not, but that it seemed like the polite thing to do. She felt sick and alone, and an innominate feeling came to her, one that can only be described as a notion to “stay alive” (47).
She asks the Legionnaire to read the “Hammurabi” index cards. He reads four cards: Hammurabi, the Roman Code of Paterfamilias, an unnamed law from Renaissance France, and the 18th century English Rule of Thumb [dramaturg note: see the glossary entries for each to learn about the validity of these claims]. Schreck corrects the earlier assertion that there weren’t enough in Washington when Asa Mercer hatched his scheme – actually there were Native American women, but because the Constitution didn’t count Native Americans as people, the marriages between Native women and White men were “illegal.” The Legionnaire reads four more cards: a case from 1910 ruling that a wife couldn’t press charges against her husband for assault [see Thompson v Thompson], the California Penal Code from 1977, Castle Rock v Gonzales, and the 2011 Inter-American Commission on Human Rights findings regarding the Castle Rock case. Heidi thanks Mike, who until now has played the Legionnaire, and tells the audience that she asked him to join the production because she “wanted some positive male energy up here with me” (49).
Mike addresses the audience and reveals that the Legionnaire character was a representation of Mel Yonkin, Heidi’s mentor. He says that he thought it was “a serious responsibility to be representing ‘positive male energy’” (49), and although he presents as male, he often feels more gender neutral. He tells about the time he and his dad were driving cross-country and playing with their CB-radio when a trucker ‘busted in’ with “Coupla queers on the line” (50). Mike’s dad used a homophobic slur as an answer to the trucker, but Mike believes if his dad had known his son was gay, he wouldn’t have. He also shares a story of being assaulted in the street by a teenager while he was wearing hot pants.
Heidi asks the audience to imagine that they’re somewhere else, and says they’re free to be themselves again. After a moment she returns to the story of her aunt who was raped, telling the audience that her mom and her aunt reported their step-father to police. They testified against him and he served a mere 2 years out of the 30 year sentence he received. She wrestles with not being able to forgive her grandmother for staying, while at the same time loving her so much. Heidi speaks about covert resistance [see the glossary for discussion].
After deplaning on a trip to Los Angeles, Heidi realized she left George II on the plane and frantically endeavored to get him back, telling the customer service agent that she’d left her sick child’s favorite toy, all the while “doing the Greek Tragedy Crying” (55). She doesn’t know why she was crying, but asserts that “maybe IT’S JUST THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW” (56).
She has conceptualized the moment where she vomited on the side of the road as having two mothers in the car with her that day – one who was a feminist, and one who inherited centuries of trauma. “I didn’t need the second mother to be there for me in the moment, because I had laws,” she says (57). She thinks that the Constitution maybe isn’t a crucible, rather it’s like her first mother, one that is “obligated to actively look out for all of us” (57). She shares her support for a constitution that is modern and focused on positive rights, with explicit gender protections – like so many other constitutions in the world. This section ends with a recording of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asserting that there will be enough women on the Supreme Court when they all hold the seats.
PART TWO: THE DEBATE
[In this section I will describe the debates as keep or abolish, since the script offers two versions in which Heidi argues both sides. Both versions are similar but I will only describe the first.]
The young debater is introduced and the debate rules are established – it will follow a permeation of Parliamentary debate in which the positions of proposition and opposition go back and forth three times each. Mike will moderate and the audience is to be actively involved, showing their feelings vocally. After taking 90 seconds to prepare, Abolish has 2 minutes to argue their
position, citing the fact that the Constitution was written by people who are long passed, society has advanced in general, and Thomas Jefferson even believed that every generation ought to write a new Constitution. Keep argues that if Abolish believes that we shouldn’t listen to the dead, then we shouldn’t listen to Jefferson, being dead himself. Keep also argues that the people who would write a new Constitution are people currently in legislative positions and will likely not write a better Constitution, and that the key to liberation lies in the document already.
Abolish argues that the US is slipping down the ranking of the Democracy Index and offers numerous examples of the ways in which democracy in the US is deteriorating. Keep acknowledges the backsliding but asserts that without the Constitution the country would be plunged into “complete chaos” (71) and that faith in the document and in US institutions should unite the people – finishing with a paraphrase of a Lincoln quote that the Constitution should be kept and the men who abuse it should be tossed. Abolish argues that many countries have adopted new constitutions peacefully, while Keep counters that the US is more diverse and therefore wouldn’t have the same outcome. Abolish pushes back saying that the Supreme Court could roll back rights even though they’re in the Constitution, while Keep disagrees citing that the Court bases decisions on precedents.
In closing, Abolish urges the consideration of a new Constitution that would be based on positive rights, asserting that a “neutral” Constitution is a negative rights Constitution that only protects the status quo. Keep concludes by urging the audience to take political action themselves if they want a more just society, because throwing out the Constitution will not, ultimately, erase discrimination. The young debater chooses an audience member who decides whether or not to keep or abolish the current US Constitution.
As the play winds down, the lights dim and the debaters ask each other questions left by the previous night’s audience members in an effort to “get to know one another as human beings” (76). The last question of each performance is planted and asks “how the young debater imagines her future – in ten years, in fifty years, etc” (77).
Works Cited
1. Schreck, Heidi. What the Constitution Means to Me. Theatre Communications Group, 2020.