The key to saving our democracy is to restore our faith in it,
and storytelling is how we will do so.
Lessons from directing Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me
By Emma Cahoon
In What the Constitution Means to Me, playwright Heidi Schreck revisits her days competing in American Legion Oratorical Contests to explore the inseparability of our personal histories and our national history. She looks back into her own past, the pasts of the generations of women that have preceded her, and into the past of this governing document and its many refractions throughout time. Heidi Schreck wrote this play in 2017, and it premiered on Broadway in 2019; pre-COVID, pre-George Floyd, pre-January 6, pre-Dobbs, pre-2024 election, and everything that has followed.
When I sat down in front of this play after signing on to direct it at the end of last summer, I was captured by the friction of how different our current landscape is from just eight years ago when Heidi wrote it. I worried that our Constitution and the Democracy it seeks to uphold are losing their meaning by the minute, and I struggled to develop a sense of direction for the play.
As we charge forward into the 250th anniversary of our country’s independence, we are confronted daily with a barrage of horrors that make many of us want to turn our hearts and minds away from the notion of a “democracy” that has rejected us and those we love. Taking an honest look at both the moment we are living through and the moments that have led us to it reveals a cracked foundation and a seemingly endless sea of false promises. Many of us no longer use the word “our” in reference to this country, because at some point, we realized we were not included in the preamble’s “We.” How can a person believe in something that never believed in them?
Most of us, across any cultural, social, or political spectrum, can agree, however, that we are facing a crisis of polarization. Extremists in all directions have heightened the stakes and killed compromise, denying nuance, listening, and conversation. Division is encouraged, and we find ourselves crawling into corners of discourse that quickly become echo chambers. The extremists in the opposite cave have never seemed more different from us, and it requires effort to keep their inflated rhetoric at bay. Our impulse in every relationship we maintain, every piece of media we consume, and every choice we make, is to seek those who affirm what we already believe to be true. This leaves no room for curiosity and little air for empathy- two key ingredients for creating cogent and stimulating change, and also for live theatre.
In truth, I struggled with this friction even as we began our rehearsal process. I had questions about how the play works in the year 2025 that I hadn’t even formed hypothetical answers to before our first readthrough. Sitting in front of the text, I realized that in order to unlock this play for myself, I needed to do the same thing Heidi sets out to do in it: to rediscover some faith in our democracy. After all, the loss of faith in our democracy might be part of what is killing it. Democracy, I realized, is like Tinker Bell; we must clap for her when she is on her deathbed, for every time you say you don’t believe in them, a fairy dies somewhere.
Now, my question was this: How do we get ourselves back to believing? How can we clap for a system that is clearly failing us? What is the “faith, trust, and pixie dust” of modern America?
Life interrupted my momentum; the very same week that we began rehearsing, my own great-grandmother, Lois, passed away at age 99. Her memorial services were held during our third week of rehearsals. The night before the funeral, I dove for hours into her large collection of genealogical research, absorbing generations-worth of family history as the Patriots beat the Dolphins in the background. In book titled “Our Family Tree,” I read the story of my ancestors’ immigration to America, written in my great-grandmother’s cursive script:
“Agnes Rylander was the oldest child of a church bellringer- a church worker who ran the school and the other secular activities. They lived next to the church. When she was sixteen, she went to live with her aunt, her father’s sister, whose only child, a son, died in infancy. She was educated as a daughter of a large property owner, learning fancy embroidery and music. She had a baby grand piano with her name on an engraved brass plaque at Trädet. Agnes fell in love with one of the workers, Wilgot Josefson, and went to America to join him two months after he immigrated to New York in 1885. They were married on her eighteenth birthday. He took the name Sanden. The Sandens lived in Mill Plains, Connecticut when daughter, Nellie was born in 1891. Agnes took Nellie to Sweden in 1896. They visited the Rylanders for a year. Nellie celebrated her sixth birthday at Trädet, the place where her parents fell in love, before coming back home to America.”
(My personal amendment to the story is this: Nellie bore a daughter named Lois, who bore a daughter named Cynthia, who bore a son named Matthew, who married a woman named Carey, and together, they had a daughter- me!)
This was the earliest story written in the book, and each subsequent tale documented on the pages in front of me revealed many more patterns in my family’s history than I had realized were there. In every generation, my ancestors have been devotees of education, artists, lovers of community, skeptics of money, believers in democracy, teachers, readers, travelers, deep appreciators of nature. I began to realize that nothing about who I am is an accident, and there it was, deep inside me- the fairy-like flutter of belief in something larger than myself.
So here, in an unexpected but ultimately very predictable place, was my answer. The secret ingredient to restoring our faith, the “pixie dust” to keep our freedom afloat- it’s stories.
Stories are incredibly powerful. We know this because we fear misinformation, misinterpretation, misuse of narrative, misrepresentation of our character or intention. Stories have the power to help us imagine new possibilities. They allow us to see ourselves within something and to believe that we, too, are worthy of adventure, joy, ambition, success, love, triumph, and resolution. Stories allow us to realize that we are a part of something larger than ourselves. Stories can remind us of the legacies of historic events and the ripples of tiny, ordinary moments that have made us who we are today.
To be an American is to have been raised with a shared set of standard stories, and therefore, the same ultimate set of core values that have unified our citizenship across time: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I may interpret the history and intentions of the Constitution differently from my neighbor, but the stories of all the various ways our Constitution has been used remind us that the facts on paper can contain a multitude of narratives. Stories illuminate the white space around the black ink on the page, remind us to constantly reinterpret, and encourage us to proudly reclaim.
Like democracy, storytelling is not a casual pastime; it is a necessity, an essential framework to our existence. This is put best by the great Audre Lorde in her 1985 essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury”:
“For within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were meant to kneel to thought as we were meant to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They lie in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. They are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.”
Storytelling is necessary for liberation because, as Lorde points out, stories unlock our desires and open us up to imagining new pathways towards freedom. To be a citizen of a democracy grants you two gifts- it grants you a set of rights, but it also imparts upon you a set of responsibilities, too. What if we begin to look at speaking our truths and sharing our stories not just as our right, but as our responsibility?
Your fathers’ and uncles’ stories from the battlefield, stories of defending democracy, are necessary, even if you have different ideas of what that democracy should look like. They are necessary because there is value in passing down stories of people fighting for what they believed in. Your grandfathers’ stories of his father’s immigration to this country are important because they remind those who came after that we are where we are for a reason; that we are a part of a whole. The story of your elementary school field trip to Plymouth Rock, with all of the amendments and reinterpretations you have retroactively colored it with over time, is valuable because of what the memory has continued to teach you through its many evolutions. The story of the time you tried to recreate your grandmother’s apple pie but mistook salt for sugar is essential, because maybe just the memory of how the original tasted will provide comfort (another necessary tool). Maybe it will remind you of how much she loved you, and how she believed, wholeheartedly, in a better life for you than the one she’d had. She told you stories of her life to instill in you the belief in a better one, and those stories are why you take to the streets now and demand it. It is necessary to tell someone you love a story about the kindness of a neighbor, and then, in return for said kindness, to tell your neighbor a story about someone you love. These stories keep us from forgetting how to be kind and how to love.
We have to be willing to participate; to bravely take a step back towards the democracy and the history that have tried to shut us out; to recognize the malleability of the moment we are living in and choose to shape it rather than watch it be shaped. We might live in a healthier democracy if we think of each other not as opponents on opposite sides of extremist funhouse mirrors of truth, but as potential tellers of stories. I think Schreck believes this, too, given that she never refers to the writers of our governing document as the “founders,” but only as the “framers.” We must prove to each other that we believe in one another, and together, share stories that rouse belief like thunderous applause loud enough for the fairy-magic of democracy to be revived.
Stories are the wind beneath the wings of where we’ve come from, who we are, and what we will become. What the Constitution Means to Me demonstrates this to be true of both our personal and national narratives, and my great-grandmother’s handwritten personal storybooks prove it, too. The storyteller in each of us is the part of us with complete agency; the storyteller is the part of us with the power to chart our own path; the storyteller within us is free and believes in freedom. That belief is what keeps the embers of this freedom alive.
