What the Constitution Means to Me

Beginning in middle school, Heidi Schreck earned her college tuition by winning Constitutional debate competitions across the United States. In this hilarious, hopeful, and achingly human new play, she resurrects her teenage self to trace the profound relationship between four generations of women and the founding document that shaped their lives.

As Schreck explains:

Our document was designed primarily to be a negative rights document, to give us the most possible individual liberty and to protect us from the government interfering in our lives. Positive rights are active rights...I believe we need a brand-new positive rights document that actively rectifies the inequality at the heart of this country. I believe we need a document that protects all of us...We all belong in the preamble.

From a NYTimes review:

Some of the unexpected joy of What the Constitution Means to Me comes from the hope that [young] people so smart and passionate and ready for change will soon be part of the electorate...[It] is theatrical activism at its purest, modeling the world the play hopes to achieve...What the Constitution Means to Me is one of the things we always say we want theater to be: an act of civic engagement. It restarts an argument many of us forgot we even needed to have.