What the Constitution Means to Me

This core theme is reflected immediately in the play’s title, which tells audiences that this play isn’t just about the Constitution but what the Constitution means to the playwright and central character, as well as what it means to every other person present in the play. In the American Legion oratorical competitions, participants are expected to make an argument about the Constitution, not based on history or historical events but on the personal connections they draw to their own lives. This is difficult for Heidi, who feels uncomfortable with the vulnerability of opening up about the traumatic history of the women in her family, even though it is the most apt personal connection she has. Her relationship with this vulnerability strengthens as she matures, reflecting back on everything she kept to herself in that debate room as a teenager.

Heidi’s connection to the Constitution drastically changes as she ages. At 15 in 1989, Heidi has experienced little in her lifetime that has required her to be cognizant of how the Constitution can give rights and take them away. When she decides to get a birth control prescription just in case she needs it, she has only ever known a world in which birth control is readily available to all women and girls. She was born with the eventual right to vote and has never seen slavery or segregation. Heidi vocally supports abortion rights, but at 15, she sees these rights as separate from her own bodily autonomy, as she expresses her sincere (at the time) belief that she would never have an abortion herself. Notably, she clarifies this to an all-male, all-white audience. It is a detail that is somewhat disconnected from her relationship with the Constitution, but by including this, she displays that she is both in support of the Constitution’s flexibility toward women’s rights while understanding that she must clarify her own feelings to, potentially, appease a more conservative, male audience. It is an unnecessary aside, and regardless of her reasoning for including this detail in her speech at age 15, it highlights the reality that Heidi is speaking to the same demographic historically responsible for limiting and removing these rights. This power imbalance is stark and is made even more drastic by the roleplay involved in the scene. As Heidi answers the question of “What the Constitution Means to Her,” adult Heidi asks the actual live audience to assume the role of her white, male panel of judges. Thus, in her reimagined version of the debate, she recreates the feeling of attempting to identify her relationship with the document to an endless sea of older white men.

Heidi, regardless of this power dynamic, holds her own in the debate room despite her growing conflicted feelings about the US Constitution. To young Heidi, the Constitution is just as full of promise as her own future, and she is in love with the loftiness of its potential. As it is written, the document is highly impersonal, becoming extremely personal when employed and interpreted to make a ruling on what is and isn’t constitutional. Heidi references Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), which set an appalling precedent declaring that formerly enslaved Black individuals could never become citizens, exempting them from protection under the Constitution and declaring it unconstitutional to ban slavery. To Dred Scott, the decision was exceedingly personal, as the ruling determined that he would remain enslaved. Heidi also discusses the 2005 case of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, in which the ruling determined that the police are not obligated to help crime victims or to even enforce the law. This outcome was intimately personal to the plaintiff, Jessica Lenahan (formerly Gonzales), who was seeking justice for her three young daughters who had been murdered after the police refused to honor a restraining order. As a precedent, this ruling broadly affected every population that was already underserved and even endangered by the police, such as women, people with disabilities, the LGBTQ community, and BIPOC. It was also personal to each American who suddenly became less safe and more likely to be victimized.

For teenaged Heidi, drawing a personal connection requires her to utilize otherwise private family issues that she is still grappling with herself. The Constitution had allowed her maternal great-great-grandmother to immigrate from Germany to the United States, where the right to travel between states protected the trafficker who brought her to Seattle to be a mail-order bride in a city full of men who abused her and others. Her death at 36 was attributed to “melancholia,” without acknowledging that birthing 16 children while trapped in a likely abusive marriage might have been the root issue. Heidi’s maternal grandmother also became imprisoned in an abusive marriage with six children. Heidi struggled to understand why her strong, loving grandmother hadn’t taken the kids and run away, not yet understanding at 15 that trying to leave an abusive spouse is the most dangerous and deadly time for a domestic violence victim, particularly because there are few resources and no guarantee that law enforcement will help or protect them.

When Heidi, at age 21, found herself unexpectedly pregnant, she decided to exercise her right to choose after all and abort. Although abortion was fully legal, Heidi discovered the multitude of ways that it was still difficult to access, all without violating the legal precedent that determined that abortion fell under the right to privacy. Drawing these personal connections demonstrates the vast gulf between what is written on parchment and lived experiences of those who were left out of the Constitution from the start. Because of the flexibility of the document, Heidi clarifies that it can mean many different things to many different people. It is the people in power who ultimately determine legal interpretation, and still today, this demographic remains nearly the same as it was when the document was founded. Heidi’s many experiences that contradict her interpretation of her (and others’) constitutional rights mean very little when she doesn’t hold a position of power.