Review: WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME Combines Brecht and NPR at City Theatre

When people use the term "Brechtian," it's easy to picture the aesthetic choices that often characterize Brecht's work: presentational and unrealistic acting styles, an excess of multimedia elements, puppetlike movement, direct audience confrontation, herky-jerky Teutonic carnival music. But the biggest and most essential element of the Brechtian theatre is that audiences must constantly be aware that what they are seeing is not real, except when it is. They are meant to be kept engaged, mentally on the edge of their seats parsing what they are witnessing. Few contemporary American plays do Brecht as well as Heidi Schreck's What the Constitution Means to Me, as directed by Marc Masterson at City Theatre.

The play is deceptively simple, though it blends multiple timelines and threads of narrative or philosophical exploration. Tami Dixon, Pittsburgh actor, plays Heidi Schreck, author and actor... but she also plays Tami Dixon, Pittsburgh actor, in scripted moments... and then IS the nonfictional Tami Dixon, Pittsburgh actor in unscripted moments. Tami-as-Tami-as-Heidi is performing the role of Heidi performing as her younger self, who paid for college by touring the country giving prizewinning (albeit naive) lectures on the United States Constitution. As the adult Heidi puzzles out her own family history over multiple generations, and how the Constitution's "penumbra" of undefined rights has impacted her in the long run, the narrative splinters and the divides between Tami, Heidi and young Heidi grow fuzzier.

There is also the constant presence of an old white Legionnaire (Ken Bolden), who doubles as Mike, a decidedly less stuffy friend of Heidi's. Positive and negative masculinity are always there on stage, either glowering or looking on approvingly, from the same body. As if things weren't complex and fluid enough already, we add in "the debater," a local high school student playing a fictionalized version of herself, and then a nonfictionalized version of herself. At my performance the debater was Swaty Mylarappa, eloquent, funny and unvarnished both as herself and as "herself."

These three performers are doing extraordinary work with a very complex script- part Brechtian call to action, part NPR monologizing. Tami Dixon is a pro at this sort of thing- I remember her show South Side Stories with great fondness. She rides the realistic and nonrealistic currents of the show with equal aplomb, and will be an awards contender this year for sure. Ken Bolden doesn't have as much to do, but his mix of caricature and realism as the Legionnaire and Mike is a gently winning performance; even the way his body language changes from stuffy to threatening to loosey-goosey and gentle tells a whole story.

I don't want to say too much about what happens in the show. Some of it is very familiar political debate. Some of it is tragicomic "the personal is political" one-woman theatre. At least some is very funny, even absurd. There are sock monkeys. There is genocide. The line between what is scripted and what is nonscripted, what is acting and what is direct address, will get VERY fuzzy. Take the ride. Embrace it. Don't be afraid to participate or talk back during the final third of the show, a breezy, seriocomic debate on a subject so broad it seems almost cartoonish to discuss it so casually. Take your pocket Constitution home with you. And think: what does the Constitution mean to YOU?

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