Next week, the Peppermint Creek Theatre Company will open a play that will feel particularly poignant in the days following a presidential election.
WKAR’s Scott Pohl takes us Inside The Arts with a preview of the drama What The Constitution Means To Me.
Americans endlessly debate the ins and outs of the U.S. Constitution, and this play is meant to encourage further discussion no matter what side of the political fence you might be on.
When What The Constitution Means To Me arrived on Broadway in 2019, playwright Heidi Schreck herself was in the lead role. It’s her own true story about traveling the country with her mom as a high-schooler earning money to pay her way through college by entering and winning Constitutional debates in American Legion halls.
Peppermint Creek founder and artistic director Chad Swan-Badgero says audiences will see three stages of Schreck’s life.“The first,” he explains, “is Heidi as a teenager, and then now her as an adult and her reflecting on her feelings about the Constitution in America, and then the final piece of the play is a real teenaged debate student playing themselves, and to basically have a debate with Heidi about whether or not we should abolish or keep the Constitution.”
That teenager is being played by Lansing Sexton High School student Tabitha Clark. Pete Johnston rounds out the cast as a Legionnaire running these Constitutional debates.
Kathleen Egan has the lead role. She and Chad Swan-Badgero are longtime friends. They had talked about this play for a long time, but Egan hadn’t thought much about playing the role of Heidi. After all, Schreck had written the part for herself. “Once it became a show that you could get the rights to, there are, I think, 100-some women who have been Heidi at some point, but we have to step into her shoes and bring the audience along as if Heidi would,” Egan says, “and she’s such an amazing, well-spoken, warm person that, those are daunting shoes to fill.”
Egan adds that she admires the way Schreck takes complex ideas about the Constitution and conveys them with accessible language. “It’s been arming me with a new language and a new set of education and perspective that I wouldn’t have got otherwise, and I think that’s the best part of getting to act, or even to do plays,” she continues. “You always get to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, and you get to learn something new that you would never necessarily deep dive into in your own interests.”
The show opens three days after a heated presidential election day. Who knows if the winner of that election will even be clear on opening night? Chad Swan-Badgero says he’s talked with his cast about how the outcome might affect audience reactions. “It could be anything, and we don’t know what that’s going to feel like,” he concludes, “but what I am excited about is how immediate the play will feel for the audience, and that is something I would desire for any play we do.”
The Peppermint Creek production of What the Constitution Means To Me opens Friday, November 8th at the Stage One Performing Arts Center.
