WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME: This post is about a quick-strike trip on Wednesday, June 5th to see WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME, the not-so sleepy hit of this season which has been nominated for a TONY AWARD for Best Play. It’s getting very close to summer-scatter season but this is too important and wonderful a work for us to not try to catch, especially since it’s closing (for real) the last week in August. But we’re also trying something else here to try and soften the blow of expensive theater tickets: we have access to a very limited number of reasonably priced tickets – $82 each – but will need to pay for them right away. So, MWC Members –go to SIGN UP! RIGHT AWAY and grab one of these.
Boy, if I had a quarter for every person who told me that this was the best play they’d seen this year – I’d be almost rich! Fortunately for us all, Janine E. , the MWC’s new theater impresario-in-residence, who sees 
everything (and a lot of things twice) has her eye on the ball and has access to some well-priced tickets and feels strongly we shouldn’t let this one get away. Slightly revised since its New York Theater Workshop run downtown, CONSTITUTION has left its audiences informed, galvanized and, yes, entertained.
WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME is about, written and performed by one Heidi Schreck who once, long ago, paid for her college education by participating in American Legion-sponsored competitions where the assigned topic was, yep, “What the Constitution Means to Me.” She introduces herself as a sunny, super-smart adolescent brimming with idealism and a newly-minted intellectual bravado. She has studied her topic backwards and forwards and thought hard about how to present it.
But as time marches on and her youthful intellect matures, she collects adult experiences, skills and reasoning and begins to look at her subject and her family history with a decidedly different take. She begins to think about what’s NOT in the Constitution, or as she puts it, “The Constitution doesn’t tell you all the rights that you have,” she says, “because it doesn’t know.” WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME takes us on Heidi Schreck’s personal journey as she tells the tale of the legal – Constitutional – repression of women by men and how there is very little in our country’s foundational document to counter it.
Part civics lesson, part personal story-telling, WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME is regarded by many as the most important American theatrical work this season. It will be almost impossible to see this and not rush for your pocket Constitution, not refresh your memory on – particularly – the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments and not think about the grand and brave civil rights battles fought by those of us not ever envisioned as being its subjects.
