Reviewed by:

• What the Constitution Means to Me by Heidi Schreck
• Natka Bianchini

What the Constitution Means to Me, Heidi Schreck’s mostly solo show about her experience as a teenager giving speeches on the US Constitution for prize money at American Legion Halls across the country, has had amazingly prescient timing. While Schreck developed and workshopped the piece for about a decade, its official theatrical premiere, at New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) in fall 2018, coincided with the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Two years later, the film version of the show premiered on Amazon’s Prime Video just days before Justice Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed in October 2020. The themes of Schreck’s show—how the Constitution has failed to protect women from domestic violence over centuries of inherited trauma on both the personal and national levels—were heightened against the political backdrop of these confirmations: two staunchly conservative justices poised to further imperil the same rights and protections that Schreck exposes as threadbare and insufficient.

Prior to its streaming release, Schreck’s show was an established success. After extending the initial run at NYTW, the production (directed for the stage by Oliver Butler) was remounted at the Hayes Theater on Broadway, where it ran from March to August 2019. Schreck was nominated for two Tony Awards, and the production subsequently enjoyed a national tour. In its final weeks on Broadway, film director Marielle Heller recorded several performances at the Hayes to create the version available on Amazon.

Like the stage show, the film runs 100 intermission-less minutes, attempting to replicate onscreen the embodied experience of witnessing the performance live. Schreck begins by reenacting the competition speech she gave on the Constitution as a 15-year-old high school student. Rachel Hauck’s brilliantly claustrophobic set recreates in vivid detail the American Legion Hall in Wenatchee, Washington. The set is a masterpiece of period details: wood paneling, maroon carpet, and a blond-wood, tabletop podium flanked by flags. But the most salient feature of the design is the suffocating rows of framed portraits: men in uniform, stacked four rows high and surrounding Schreck on three sides of a doorless room, more than 150 in all. As Schreck reveals that the twentieth century saw more American women killed by male partners than the total US combat fatalities for all wars combined, including 9/11, concluding that “rampant violence against women’s bodies is there underneath everything, all the time, humming,” the unspoken yet menacing threat of these silent portraits is inescapable.

Heidi Schreck in What the Constitution Means to Me. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

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Because so much of the show is a solo performance and because it lacks any whizz-bang moments of technical wizardry, What the Constitution Means to Me is ideally suited for this transfer to the small screen. Yet one element of the film I found striking was Heller’s decision to include many audience-reaction shots, reminding the viewer frequently that this was a live performance. During the theatrical run (which I also had the privilege of seeing), Schreck was lit onstage and the audience was, save for a few key moments, in darkness. Heller brought in extra lighting instruments to illuminate the audience during filming. This allowed her to capture dozens of audience-reaction shots and edit them into the film. The editing highlights the success of the show as a dialogue between performer and audience, and underscores the audience’s role as active participant—a vocal counterpart to the wordless stares of those framed male portraits on-stage. Schreck herself is white and careful both to note her family’s white privilege and to lift up the stories of women of color who are even more vulnerable under the US legal system. The audience, at least as showcased through Heller’s editing choices, is surprisingly diverse in race, age, and gender (a rarity for Broadway), and so Heller is able to punctuate Schreck’s words by whose faces she shows...

审核人：

• 宪法对我意味着什么Heidi Schreck
• 纳特卡·比安奇尼

宪法对我意味着什么，海蒂·施莱克 (Heidi Schreck) 的大部分个展讲述了她十几岁时在全国各地的美国军团大厅就美国宪法发表演讲以获得奖金的经历，其时机非常有先见之明。虽然 Schreck 开发和制作这件作品大约十年，但它于 2018 年秋季在纽约剧院工作室 (NYTW) 的官方戏剧首映式恰逢最高法院法官布雷特·卡瓦诺 (Brett Kavanaugh) 的确认听证会。两年后，该节目的电影版在艾米·康尼·巴雷特法官于 2020 年 10 月获得确认的前几天在亚马逊的 Prime Video 上首映。 Schreck 节目的主题——宪法如何在数百年的遗传创伤中未能保护妇女免受家庭暴力在个人和国家层面——在这些确认的政治背景下得到了加强：

在流媒体发布之前，Schreck 的节目取得了成功。在延长纽约时报的首映后，这部作品（由奥利弗·巴特勒执导）在百老汇的海斯剧院重新上演，并于 2019 年 3 月至 8 月上演。施莱克获得了两项托尼奖提名，随后这部作品获得了好评全国巡演。在百老汇的最后几周，电影导演 Marielle Heller 在 Hayes 录制了几场表演，以制作在亚马逊上可用的版本。

与舞台表演一样，这部电影也有 100 分钟的中场休息时间，试图在银幕上复制现场观看表演的具体体验。施莱克首先重演了她作为 15 岁高中生就宪法发表的竞争演讲。雷切尔·豪克 (Rachel Hauck) 出色的幽闭恐惧症场景以生动的细节再现了华盛顿韦纳奇的美国军团大厅。该套装是时代细节的杰作：木镶板、栗色地毯和两侧有旗帜的金色木质桌面讲台。但该设计最显着的特点是令人窒息的一排排框架肖像：穿着制服的男人，四排高，围绕在无门房间三侧的施莱克，总共超过 150 幅。

海蒂·施莱克（Heidi Schreck）在《宪法对我意味着什么》中。（照片：琼·马库斯。）

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因为这部剧的大部分内容都是单人表演，而且因为它缺乏任何技术奇才的精彩瞬间，宪法对我意味着什么非常适合这种转移到小屏幕。然而，我发现这部电影的一个引人注目的元素是海勒决定加入许多观众反应镜头，经常提醒观众这是一场现场表演。在戏剧表演期间（我也有幸看到了），施莱克在舞台上被点亮了，观众除了几个关键时刻外，都处于黑暗中。海勒在拍摄过程中带来了额外的照明设备来照亮观众。这使她能够捕捉到数十个观众反应镜头并将它们编辑成电影。剪辑突出了表演作为表演者与观众之间对话的成功，并强调了观众作为积极参与者的角色——与舞台上那些被框住的男性肖像无言凝视的声音相对应。施莱克本人是白人，她小心翼翼地注意到她家族的白人特权，并提起有色人种女性在美国法律制度下更加脆弱的故事。观众，至少通过海勒的编辑选择所展示的，在种族、年龄和性别方面出奇地多样化（在百老汇很少见），因此海勒能够通过她所展示的面孔来标明施莱克的话......