The New Yorker Radio Hour - What the Constitution Means to the Playwright Heidi Schreck

Episode Date: May 14, 2019

Few Americans dispute the centrality of the Constitution as a statement of our country’s goals; it is as though holy. But what the Constitution actually means to any two people may differ widely, and those differences are dramatized in a new play, on Broadway, called “What the Constitution Means to Me.” It’s essentially a one-person show written and performed by Heidi Schreck (profiled in The New Yorker by Michael Schulman), and it’s her first play to reach Broadway. The performer reflects on her personal history as a high-school debate champion, when she was rewarded for upholding an officially sanctioned view of American politics that she has come to realize is a distortion. Both the play and Schreck’s performance have been nominated for Tony Awards; it’s a hit, and it’s a cultural flashpoint in an era when the phrase “constitutional crisis” is invoked almost weekly. Dorothy Wickenden spoke with Heidi Schreck. Plus, SoundCloud rap—once a marginal, willfully weird genre for amateurs—has lately created some of the biggest hits in hip-hop. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. What the Constitution means to me is the title of a one-person show written and performed by Heidi Shrek. It was also the title of a speech that Shrek used to deliver a very long time ago at high school speech contests. Her show is on Broadway now, and it's something of a surprise hit. In the play, Shrek, talks about the protections that the Constitution guarantees and also the lack of protections and how those policies shaped her life in her family's history. What the Constitution means to me has been nominated for two Tony Awards and it's become a kind of cultural flashpoint in the era of William Barr, Brett Kavanaugh, and Donald Trump.

The fact is, there was no way for the framers to put down every single right we have. I mean, the right to brush your teeth. Yes, you've got it. But how long do we want this document to be? Here's another example. When I was a little girl, I had an imaginary friend named Reba McIntyre. She was not related to the singer. Just because the Constitution does not proclaim, the having of imaginary friends as one of my rights does not mean I can be thrown in jail for being friends with Reba McIntyre.

Isn't that amazing? Think about it for a moment. Our Constitution doesn't tell you all the rights that you have because it doesn't know. Dorothy Wickenden, who hosts the New York, Yorker's political scene podcast spoke with Heidi Shrek. Thank you so much for joining me on a day where you should be sort of kicking back and relaxing before your show tonight. Thank you.

I'm very excited to talk with you. So I saw the play last week, and I really haven't been able to stop thinking about it. We talk about political news every week, usually about the grotesque real-life theater, political theater unfolding every day in Washington. But you found such an unlikely way to shed light on the conference. constitutional crisis of the moment. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. When I first began writing this play, I didn't intend to shed light on the constitutional crisis of the moment. That was some years ago. It was about 10 years ago. I started exploring

the Constitution in relationship to my own family history. I had done this contest as a teenage girl where I would travel a country giving speeches about the Constitution for prize money. And I thought it would be interesting to go back and tell a personal story in relationship to this document that has really shaped our lives in our country. So I never imagined it would become as relevant as it is today. I was really looking at something quite personal and exploring a story that takes place over four generations. It's about as unlikely as a rap musical about Alexander Hamilton. Exactly. Indeed. As you were working through the complications of the show, it sounds as though when you started thinking about the 14th Amendment and thinking about your own heritage and the women and your family, suddenly the show just made sense and came together. How was that?

So, I mean, the 14th Amendment was one of the Reconstruction Amendments. Part of it is birthright citizenship. So it ensured that former slaves could be considered citizens. It protected their right to vote. And it also guaranteed. them and, you know, ideally everyone equal protection under the law. When I decided that the guiding principle of the show was that I was going to take the prompt of the contest seriously and try to draw a personal connection between my own life and the Constitution, which was impossible for me to do at 15 because I didn't know enough about myself or my family or history or the Constitution. When I decided to do that. As a, you know, a 40-year-old, I suddenly realized that so many of the things that had deeply affected my life had a relationship to the 14th Amendment.

So those things include birth control. They include abortion, Roe v. Wade. And then I have this history of domestic and sexual violence in my family. And so when I began to look at the Supreme Court cases that were. related to physical and sexual violence toward women, I realized that the 14th Amendment had played a vital role in those cases as well. I also learned while studying it that the 14th Amendment was the first time that the word male was explicitly written into the Constitution. So while the 14th Amendment asserted equal protection under the law for everyone, it also made it clear that only male citizens were guaranteed the right to vote.

And I get maybe one of the reasons I particularly like this part of the play is because I've been writing a book about three women who fought for years for abolition and women's rights during the 1800s in the years leading up to and into the Civil War. And I came across a letter just a couple days before I saw the show that Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote to Susan B. Anthony in 1866 about the 14th Amendment, which, as you say, purportedly guarantees equal protection under the law. She said they were incensed by the, they knew what the conversation was underway in Congress. And she said, if the word male was inserted into the Constitution, it would take women a century to get it out again. Now, that was a bit of an exaggeration. but it did take, as you say in the play, 54 years. Yes. So they went on, they unsuccessfully petitioned Congress to demand that the 14th Amendment

prohibit disenfranchisement on account of sex as well as race. And of course, they failed. Yes, they failed. Yeah, and as you know, I'm sure what was fascinating about that is that there were states where women were enfranchised, where women could vote. And progress was being made. in terms of women's right to vote. And then that word went in the Constitution and suddenly it felt like everything was moving backwards. So you also talk about the 1965 Supreme Court case,

Griswold versus Connecticut. And another favorite part of mine. You play an audio recording during the show. So Estelle Griswold was arrested for dispensing birth control at a clinic in New Haven. And Justice William O'Douglas wrote the majority opinion, drawing on the First and the Ninth Amendment I now know, to construe a right to privacy between husband and wife. And while I was sitting there, it just sort of blew my mind to realize, again, that contraception wasn't legal at the time. And this would make contraception legal for married couples and set a precedent for Roe. So in the recording, and maybe you could talk a little bit about this,

how you got the idea to play it and what happens? Sure. So I was listening, so first of all, I've listened to hundreds and hundreds of hours of OIA dot com, ohia.org. I love it so much. I listened to all these Supreme Court cases. And I decided to listen to Griswold v. Connecticut so that I could educate myself about birth control, the right to birth control in this country. And the first thing I noticed when I started listening to the case is how uncomfortable all the men were talking about birth control and about women's bodies and about women's health.

The woman who cannot have another child without incurring ill health or death has no other solution to that medical problem. I just started laughing and laughing while I was listening to them. I mean, maybe because I am a playwright and an actor and not a legal scholar. Like, that was the thing I was hearing. I was hearing, you know, their performance.

I was hearing the way they were talking about these things and the subtext of how they were talking about these things. And I just thought it really brought home for me how ludicrous it was for this decision about women's health, about women's reproduction, about birth control, the fact that it was being made by all. By nine justices. By nine male justices. Well, so we know that William O. Douglas was having an affair with a 20. 22-year-old college student because he later married her. The other three justices, I only can get people to talk to me about off the record. Even now. Even now. But definitely, I mean, this is the other thing that when I listened to this recording that I thought about was just like the

hypocrisy of it all. Because the truth is like birth control was not constitutionally protected for all women until 1972. But of course, everybody was using birth control. It's not like, it's not like it didn't exist or people weren't, you know, you could go to the drugstore and buy a condom, despite the Comstock laws, despite it was being technically illegal in Connecticut. And yet, it was so difficult for this court to just come out and say, like, of course, this is a protected, right. So to speak. Yeah. You never utter the word Trump in the show. I don't know. And you don't need to. And so just on my way up here from downtown, I was compulsively checking my phone for the show. I don't know. I don't know. And you don't need to. And so just on my way up here from downtown, I was compulsively checking my phone for the phone for the show. I was. I was. I was. I was. I was. I was. I was the news, as people tend to do these days. And the newest headline is, White House asserts executive privilege over the Mueller report. So for the umpteenth time since the election of 2016, people are again talking about a constitutional crisis. Yes. And the night I was there in the audience, there was this palpable sense that a cathartic experience was underway. Right. Do you, what does it feel like for you on stage as you relate to your audience's reactions to the play?

It changes dramatically every night depending on what is happening that day. For example, I performed the show during the Kavanaugh hearings and the audience was very emotional. There were just audible sounds of grief. There were audible sounds of response. Strangely, during that time period, people voted to abolish the Constitution a lot, maybe because they felt like, you know, because it felt like for some people, the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court and the way it operates wasn't working, although, as you know. You're referring to the scene at the end of the play.

Yes, yeah, we debate at the end of the play whether to abolish or keep the Constitution. And during that time period, people were voting to abolish a lot. The day that Trump, that the AP reported that Trump had said he was going to get rid of birthright citizenship, which of course he can't do. But when they reported that that night,

the audience broke into applause when I just simply read the birthright citizenship clause. I just read it. very neutral voice and that elicited a huge response from the audience. So I don't change the language of the play very much from night to night. And I never really refer to anything that's happening on that day, but the subtext of the play changes every night and what people are bringing into the play changes. So right now, people are always voting to keep the Constitution, and I understand I understand why. So it's so interesting because that wasn't all that long ago, the

No, no. You know, the show does offer a warning and a call to action. And I wonder when you're looking back on it, say a year or two from now, what do you hope it will have accomplished? I, so I don't create things hoping for any particular response. So the fact that it's sort of expanded into this thing that reaches so many people is exciting for me. And I think the only thing I hope for people is that it brings people who maybe are suffering through this moment the way many people are a sense of community. And that's been true for me, just like the ability to like show up in a room every night and think through what's going on in our country and have space to have feelings about

it and to grieve about it and to also find ways to find hope for our future. It's made me a much happier person than I was two years ago when I was just scrolling through Twitter and despair on my sofa. Thank you so much, Heidi. Break a leg tonight. Thank you so much. Heidi Shrek is the writer and star of what the Constitution means to me, and it's on Broadway now. And it's nominated for two Tony Awards.

Dorothy Wickendon is executive editor at The New Yorker, and she hosts our podcast, The Political Scene, talking every week with our report. about the news in Washington and well beyond. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and welcome back. I'm David Remnick. We're going to talk for a minute about SoundCloud. And if you're not familiar with it, SoundCloud is sort of like the YouTube of audio. It's a website and an app, and you post sound files

on it instead of videos. For musicians struggling to be heard, though, SoundCloud offers a way to reach huge audiences, especially for rappers. In the music world, SoundCloud rap suddenly became all the rage. One of our music critics, Carrie Batten, has written all about it. So, Carrie, fill me in. What makes SoundCloud rap distinctive?

What makes it a thing unto itself? It started as many things do as a countercultural movement, and then I think it very, very quickly became co-opted by the mainstream in a kind of unprecedented way. Very low-fi, DIY sounding. One synonym for SoundCloud rap is mumble rap.

So it doesn't care at all about the craft. It's laughing at the craft of hip-hop. It's saying... The craft of enunciation and pacing and delivery. And syntax, yes. But what it did was it paved the way for this very vast, rapid deconstruction of rap music itself. So that means what? What has it left behind and what are you going to play for us today?

Basically, if you look at the hip-hop charts now, it's very difficult to find a song that resembles hip-hop in the traditional sense. Hip-hop is extremely omnivorous and they're open to any style of music and you see that some of the youngest and brightest rappers are sort of picking up influences wherever they can find them. They're referencing emo and rock from the 2000s. They idolize Marilyn Manson and they're doing whatever they want right now. So where to begin? What's your first choice from the legacy of sound cloud rap? So I think Juice World is the name of a rapper and He's a young guy from Chicago, and he's kind of like a gateway in the SoundCloud

Rap world. He has one foot in the SoundCloud rap world, one foot in the pop world. It's kind of the later class of SoundCloud rappers, and he has just had enormous success on the charts on radio. And this song that we're going to listen to is called Ring Ring. I wish everyone would leave me alone. I don't feel like coming to the phone today. Ring ring ring.

I don't feel like coming to me. So this is a pretty poppy sound. What's been the fate of Juice World since his appearance on SoundCloud rap? He was kind of very quickly snapped up by Interscope Records. He got a huge record deal, and I think he's released two projects since then, of all varying styles, all of which have experienced enormous commercial success, despite the fact that they're not very cohesive. They don't really sound like anything else. So now we have somebody named Lil Nas X. What's his story?

So he is a kid from Atlanta who started out on an app called TikTok. He's maybe the first TikTok star to really break through to the mainstream. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but it's a kind of a Chinese video editing and sharing app. And so he recorded this song just kind of tinkering around. And I think you will be shocked to hear. how little it sounds like rap. I think a lot of boots to the old-time road. I think a lot of people understand hip-hop as a, you know, the attitude of arrogance and of prowess and of prowess and dominance. But SoundCloud rappers are very much about reveling in their depression and their hatred of the world and their emotional fragilities. I think you heard in that first Juice World song that he's just, I don't feel like coming to the phone today.

He's a sad, mopey guy. Is that the case for Lil Nas X? No, Lil Nas X is much more of a comedian. I mean, that is one thing that a lot of the SoundCloud rappers have is a comic sensibility. And I think Lil Nas X actually does share that, although he doesn't use that. to express sadness, he kind of uses it to play a character and build a world. Now, I think you've written that this parallels between the themes and language of SoundCloud rappers and the InCell community. Explain what the InSell community is for those who might not know.

Right. InSell is short for involuntary celibate, which are, it's just this sort of subculture that aligns itself with the alt-right online. guys who are just upset about the fact that they cannot seem to get a date. Nicely said. And they peg the blame onto the women who will not date them, and they think it's this sort of mass conspiracy on the part of women. But you're not saying these songs are in cell. But what's uniting them as a kind of mopeiness? A mopeiness, and especially with some of the earlier SoundCloud rappers and Juice World,

sort of an attitude towards women. And it also aligns very closely with sort of the emo rock of the 2000s, which is like women suck, they're stupid, they hate me, like I'm all alone. Now you've got a third pick, Dominic Fike, who's singing Three Nights. Three nights, yes. Three nights at the motel under streetlights in the city of palms. Call me what you want me up. Feel like the least of all your problems. You can't reach me if you want to stay up tonight.

You can call me names if you call me up. I like that. So, Carrie, tell me about Dominic Fike. He is sort of currently the buzz of the entire music industry. He's somebody who also started as a rapper, qua rapper, and started making this way more poppy, poppy, pop rock guitar strumming beach bonfire music. Now, you wrote a piece called How SoundCloud Rap Took Over Everything. Yes.

And that was published in January 2019. Is it over? Well, technically the term SoundCloud Rap has become Pass A. This is a style of music that isn't so much dying as it is kind of metastasizing. and eating up everything else and then turning it out and coming up with new weird mutations of it. And not to get all grandiose about it, but does it have anything to do with the political or economic moment, SoundCloud Room? It might have something to do with the political moment, but it also has something to do with this social moment of rising numbers of mental illness and, you know, sort of the toxicity of social media and the sort of overall malays. that young people are suffering from these days.

Nowadays it's more pronounced because, A, you're just absorbing so much more information and so many other, and your friends malaise at all times. And then you're living it all out through social media, so there's a tendency to kind of perform it. There's so much irony in that explanation because people are obsessed with it and it's making them feel horrible and yet it can't be put away. Exactly, yes. Well, now I feel much, much better. Right, and I can't wait to go check Instagram when this is over. Carrie, thanks so much. Thank you so much, David.

The New Yorker's Carrie Batten. We talked about Ring Ring by Juice World, Lil Nas X with Old Town Road, and Dominic Fikes three nights. That's our show for this week. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening. Have a great week.

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