The one-woman show resurrects a real speech that Schreck gave when she was 15-years-old, in scholarship competitions around the country. Through the speech, she threads stories of her own family — her great-great-grandmother, who was ordered from Germany in a catalogue for $75; her grandmother, who endured a violent husband for decades; and her mother, who grew up in that violence before finally testifying against her stepfather.
She frames the speech around the 14th Amendment — “a giant, supercharged force field, protecting all of your human rights” — and how our government, over the centuries, has chosen who gets to be inside that force field. “I want to emphasize that these amendments guaranteed equal rights only to men,” she says, channeling her 15-year-old self. “Black women were not given these rights. No women were given these rights. The question of Native American rights never even came up.
The performance is clearly bolstered by extensive, constitutional research, but it never feels dry or academic — which is just one of the reasons the play was nominated for a Best Play Tony and a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as earning Schreck a Tony nomination for acting. Through intimate windows into the lives of the women in her own family, she illustrates the real, human-scale harm of living amongst “laws that tell her she’s worthless.
About halfway through the show, Schreck gallops across the stage, ecstatically miming “log running.” It was her Grandma Bette’s “other job” — standing on a wooden raft, pushing logs down a raging river with a giant stick. “This is my favorite part of the show!” she hollers. Despite the incredible weight of the issues that Schreck takes on in this performance — and yes, you’ll probably cry at some point—you don’t walk away from it feeling heavy. It’s energizing, exciting.
This year, a film like this feels like a balm. Our founding document may have left most of us in the penumbra 230 years ago, buturges us to imagine one that doesn’t — and there’s never been a more important time for that kind of imagination. As she says at the end of the show: “We all belong in the preamble.”
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