Julia Gibson and Amari Bullett by HuthPhoto, courtesy of PlayMakers Repertory Company

CHAPEL-HILL, NC – Just under two hours into PlayMakers Repertory Company‘s intermissionless performance of What the Constitution Means to Me, two of the show’s three actors, Julia Gibson and Amari Bullett, took the lights back down. Then they settled into a couple of folding chairs, just to shoot the breeze, and casually took on a few questions written by a previous evening’s audience (except for the last one, which is a plant from the script).

Boomers and those before will recall that Carol Burnett and Cher both used to do something like this, only at the start of their respective 1970s TV shows. And it still happens often enough in Vegas, when a performer wants to add a little back-and-forth, a little intimacy to a show, and let the audience feel they’re getting closer, for a taste of a headliner off-script – if only slightly, since the questions are generally predictable.

As an opener in live theater, one could argue that the practice has devolved into the pre-show curtain speech.

But two hours in, as a closer, it’s an indulgence. Playwright Heidi Schreck, having said what she’d come to say, elected instead to let her actors just keep on talking, to us and to each other, for a few minutes more, so that they, in the words of the script, can “get to know one another as human beings.”

Presumably, it’s insufficient for the two to do this on their own time; instead, it must be done in this performative and public fashion. If it’s that important, though, why was the third actor, Jeffrey Meanza, not included in this schmoozy spin-down?

“What three cities would you like to live in?” “What subjects do you wish you knew more about?” “Where do you see yourself in ten years?” These decidedly anticlimactic queries in a supposedly innovative closing sequence confidently took Schreck’s stage play into the previously unexplored realm…of the talk show. Clearly, they were far less incisive, interesting – and germane – than the truly needful questions Schreck had courageously raised over most of the previous hour and three-quarters.

What the Constitution Means to Me begins as a biographical one-person show – autobiographical in the original versions on and off Broadway, in which Schreck herself traced on stage the roots of her teenage obsession with the U.S. Constitution back to her hometown of Wenatchee, Washington. In different parts of the show she succinctly describes the rural, conservative town during her childhood in the 1980s as “The Apple Capital of the World” and “an abortion-free zone.”

Schreck tells us at the outset that she loved the constitution in her teens. “I was a zealot,” she says (through the intermediary performance of veteran actor Julia Gibson in this PlayMakers production).

Several things fuel this fixation. The pursuit of prize money certainly doesn’t hurt: by 1989, when the play begins, oratory contests on the titled topic, sponsored by the American Legion, had already awarded over $3 million in scholarship money to high school students across the country.

woman standing in front of a wall of men's photos in uniform

Julia Gibson by HuthPhoto, courtesy of PlayMakers Repertory Company

So, following the “scheme” of her debate coach mom, research in an approved history book (Your Rugged Constitution, a 1954 tome endorsed by no less a patriot than Herbert Hoover), and study with her dad, which gave them both a depressurizing “way…to pretend I wasn’t becoming a woman,” Schreck traveled the West and Midwest at age 15, delivering patriotic speeches in venues like Wenatchee’s American Legion hall, rendered here in pine-paneled and particle board modesty by designer Derrick Ivey.

Her presentations, at least as they’re remembered here, also manage none too subtly to reflect Schreck’s other teenage passions, including sex, Patrick Swayze and a certain Arthur Miller play about the Salem witch trials, when she suggests the Constitution is in fact a crucible: “a boiling pot in which we are thrown together in sizzling and steamy conflict to find out what it is we truly believe,” she asserts.

A teen’s level of critical sophistication – and her saturation in Gen X cultural references – further collide when she confidently summarizes the 14th Amendment as “a giant, supercharged force field protecting all of your human rights,” before concluding that the Constitution’s 9th and 14th Amendments “came together in a ‘Wonder Twin powers activate’ kind of way to protect a woman’s right to choose” in Roe v. Wade.

But What the Constitution Means to Me transcends the trappings of kitsch memoir when Schreck’s character, now a woman in her forties, comes to a very dead reckoning with the impact that the constitution – and its interpreters, across differing eras and political spectrums – have directly had on her family’s history, and the women of her family in particular.

The calculus begins with acknowledging that her great-great-grandmother would likely have never been shipped to Washington state as a mail-order bride if the government had not disallowed the marriages between white settlers and indigenous women when it joined the union, a decision that created a nine-to-one disparity between legally marriageable men and women at the time.

It continues through the history of contraception and abortion, which became criminalized in the U.S. late in the nineteenth century. “Birth control became available for single women in 1972,” Schreck’s character observes, “one year after my mom got pregnant with me.”

In Gibson’s performance, Schreck calmly, clearly outlines the biggest hazard of having a “living, breathing” constitution. It’s in the contingency of rights that can be temporarily conferred – and then withdrawn – from those who were left out of the document from the start. She considers the 2005 Supreme Court case Castle Rock v. Gonzalez, in which the court decided that the police did not have to protect a woman from an abusive man who violated a permanent restraining order, and subsequently bought a gun, killing their three children. “What does it mean,” she asks, bewilderedly, “if this document offers no protection against the violence of men?”

After a retrospective of laws on domestic violence from the code of Hammurabi through Roman paterfamilias, the French renaissance and 18th-century England, Schreck praises her own grandmother, who testified as a teenager against her abusive step-great grandfather, despite inheriting “centuries of belief in her own worthlessness – no, not belief: centuries of laws that explicitly told her she was worthless.”

Schreck’s case-making, threading the developments in constitutional law along the lines of her family’s own experiences, makes compelling theater out of what in other hands would be dry legalese.

Unfortunately, What the Constitution Means to Me is also seriously compromised by some of the sloppiest dramatic construction and writing I’ve seen in years on a professional stage.

Given its strengths – and particularly, the political timeliness of the issues Schreck raises – I wish it were not so.

In an early sequence, after introducing a sock monkey whose relevance to the Constitution is basically non-existent, Schreck’s character says, “You probably think I’ve gone off on a tangent. I haven’t. There are no tangents in this show.”

(In a line left out of Saturday night’s opening performance, Schreck continues in the script: “In spite of how it feels, and apparently what some people think, this play is quite carefully constructed.”)

It’s always interesting when a playwright feels the need to defend her work in mid-performance; still, duly noted, all.

After setting up the theatrical frame in order to let her present-day character step back into and relive her memories as a fifteen-year-old at a speech competition, Schreck’s character increasingly keeps stepping out of the frame, to share asides and later realizations beyond those of her teenaged self.

All in all, this kind of time travel is still fair game for the theater, as her character repeatedly shifts in and out of a competition scene where her words are being measured with a stopwatch. (The time piece is being held by actor Meanza, who appears to be playing an official at the American Legion who’s running the speech contest.)

As her excursions into the constitutional connections between her family’s history and her own medical past lengthen, it becomes vaguer and vaguer whether Schrek’s character is with us in the present, or in the past.

Finally, she abruptly abandons the initial frame entirely: “I’m going to talk about the equal protection clause as myself, now. In fact, I’m just gonna go ahead and be myself all the time now…a grown woman in my mid-forties. Hello. Also, my face just fucking hurts from smiling.”

Then, she turns to the Legionnaire’s character and says, “I’m not sure what your purpose is anymore.”

So far, so avant-garde.

Julia Gibson and Jeffrey Meanza by HuthPhoto, courtesy of PlayMakers Repertory Company

Then, Schreck’s character feels the need to reassure us, apropos of nothing, that the actor playing the Legionnaire is a good person. She then introduces Meanza as “a wonderful actor and a wonderful man,” Mike Iveson, the real actor who played the Legionnaire in this show’s original production. “When I realized that there was going to be so much violence in this play, I really wanted some positive male energy up here with me,” Schreck explains.

After interrupting her own production to explain the casting choice she’s made in mid-performance Schrek then cedes the stage and the show to Iveson, who takes at least five minutes explaining the background on his character, and then delving into apparent autobiographical reminiscences about his own childhood, including a crush on Mel Gibson, a road trip with his father, realizing he was gay, and navigating New York bars and streets as a gay man.

Good material – for a talk show at least. Still, its connection to the constitution – and everything that’s come before – could only be called tenuous at the very best. Ultimately, it reads like padding.

After that dilatory passage, the two share an introspective silence under Aubrey Snowden’s direction, as they look around at the stage.

Then Schreck says of the set she dreamed up, “I’d really like for all of this to disappear now. This contest. All of it. I wish we could have one of those spectacular scene changes now, but it’s not that kind of a play. Maybe we could all just imagine that we’re somewhere else. Maybe we could imagine something else.”

The problem? Those are the jobs of the playwright, who can’t just abdicate in mid-work after hitting a dramaturgical dead-end like this.

Before and after these exchanges, some audience members clearly imagined other places to be. To get there, they walked out on the show, in numbers I’ve rarely seen in Paul Green Theater.

That’s particularly frustrating since, after these artistic missteps, Schreck offers further insights once the show regains its footing. And the penultimate section, the staging of a scripted live debate, with Amari Bullett, a talented high school actor playing a high school debater, was a high-energy exercise in considered – and civil – disagreement, a vanishing rarity in our present culture.

But when these useful observations are housed in a work whose tangents, narrative hijackings, structural collapses and needlessly extended time on stage ultimately challenge the patience and bodies of an audience, central messages that this culture still desperately needs get too easily lost.

Performances of What the Constitution Means to Me run through November 3. See our calendar for details.