It was a Friday night when I picked up my friend, a fellow local legal aid lawyer, and drove over to the Milwaukee Rep to see a play whose plot I was largely unfamiliar with. She knew of the Pulitzer Prize Finalist show, but all I knew was the title of the play. Still, I figured the show would especially resonate with me, given its title: What the Constitution Means to Me, by Heidi Schreck.
Sitting in the Stiemke Studio black box theater, my friend and I were reminded of how live, local theater can take you outside of yourself for a trip through someone else’s story, only to return you right back to yourself with an expanded capacity to think, reflect, and perhaps, to love, to forgive, to persevere. An unexpected high point of the show was a voice recording of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The audio clip captured her reflections on the lack of women representation on the highest court in our land.
In her commentary, the late Justice remarks that when she was college-aged, women were rarely hired into judges’ chambers, “strictly forbidden” in some spaces, and largely not given access to the room where it happens. The excuse at the time was that women weren’t up to dealing with the “tough types” of people that these offices work with and represent. Her response to this is “…I was amazed. I said, have you seen the lawyers at legal aid who are representing these tough types? They’re all women.”
Progress has been made a pendulum, an arc that bends toward justice, and in this play, thanks to an analogy offered by Heidi's mother, a woman walking with her dog down a beach. As they journey together, the dog "keeps running ahead and then running backwards, so that if you only keep your eye on the dog it seems like progress is constantly being undone", Heidi shares. "But if you watch the woman, you can she she is steadily moving forward and forward and forward."
What the Constitution Means to Me runs until March 17, 2024, in Milwaukee Rep’s Stiemke Studio, after extending its run due to high ticket demand.