“What the Constitution Means to Me,” Heidi Schreck’s Tony-nominated exploration of the document’s gender and racial biases, will be the most performed work in the United States for the second year in a row. And this week, just days before the U.S. presidential election, it will have its Canadian premiere.
The timing is intentional. By presenting the work starting Friday, at the Soulpepper Theater in Toronto, its artistic director, Weyni Mengesha, said she wants the production to not only inspire Canadian audiences to pay attention to what’s happening in the United States but also in their own political sphere.
“Things that happen down south affect things up here,” Mengesha said. “And we’re feeling a similar sense of divisiveness.”
Canadians are contending with a housing crisis, sky-high grocery bills, debates about immigration, and a leader — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — whose own party wants him to step down.
But how do you retool a highly specific work for audiences who may be unfamiliar with the finer points of the U.S. Constitution?
Toward the end of U.S. productions of “What the Constitution Means to Me,” the protagonist debates a high schooler about whether to keep or scrap the U.S. Constitution. In Toronto, the production’s star, Amy Rutherford, and a local student will instead debate the merits of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which was created in 1982 as part of the country’s Constitution.
Over three days this year, Schreck, Mengesha and Rutherford held a workshop to imagine what a Canadian take on the play could look like. Joshua Sealy-Harrington, a Canadian constitutional scholar, helped tease out the politics, including how the modern charter is actually working and who it is and isn’t protecting.
“It was an interesting evolution for my show,” Schreck said, “to say, ‘OK, here’s a country that has one of these documents I’ve been idolizing. Let’s see what’s actually going on.’”
The play is mostly autobiographical — delving into Schreck’s own life and the lives of her mother and other women in her family — and follows her growing disillusionment with a document written by a group of men who didn’t view some Americans as fully human.
Mengesha saw “What the Constitution Means to Me” on Broadway in 2019 and was struck by how Schreck had turned such a “personal piece” into “an entry point for people who might feel overwhelmed by the Constitution.”
When Mengesha reached out to Schreck last year about staging her show in Canada, Schreck said that she had already been considering ways to make the play work for non-American theaters. (Soulpepper is presenting the production with Nightwood Theater in association with Necessary Angel and Talk Is Free Theater.)
Canadians prize the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Rutherford said, and have had intense reactions to the reworked play.
“It eclipses hockey and the beaver,” she said. “But if you actually ask the average Canadian to name sections of the charter, they might struggle.” She added, “If anything, I hope this play gets people to open that door a crack — to pique their curiosity, to try to understand what this document is, and why it’s so valued.”
Speaking about her own relationship to the work, Rutherford said, “I had never deeply considered how the laws that exist around us actually impact us personally.”
Schreck has long viewed Canada “with envy,” particularly for its publicly funded health care system, and imagined the country being more advanced than the United States in its advocacy for marginalized groups, especially Indigenous communities. Reworking her play, she said, has complicated those views.
“We’re neighbors,” she said. “It’s not as if the issues that are explored in the play are foreign to Canadians.”
In many ways, Canada’s Charter offers a more robust framework for equal rights than its U.S. counterpart. Section 15 of the Charter, for instance, guarantees every Canadian equal protection and benefit from the law regardless of “race, national or ethnic origin, color, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.” In the United States, politicians have tried for a century to enact the Equal Rights Amendment, which would explicitly guarantee sex equality for Americans.
But work remains to be done, Schreck said, pointing to the “inequalities” that persist in Canada. For instance, the last Canadian residential school for Indigenous children closed in 1997 — the harms caused by the so-called schools persist today. More broadly, a vast majority of the recommendations regarding Indigenous communities in Canada from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission have not been followed.
All three women spoke apprehensively about the U.S. election; they are aware the energy in the theater may change depending on the outcome next Tuesday. Still, Soulpepper is hosting an election night watch party following that evening’s performance.
“We are watching these elections on the edge of our seats,” Mengesha said. “I’m hoping this run becomes evidence that the play can transcend borders.”
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