By Kristen Nevarez Schweizer

March 3, 2025

Every day, too many people find themselves doom scrolling through click-bait headlines and having imaginary shower conversations with family members who stand on ‘the other side’ of the aisle. While I can only pray for perspective — remembering that millions of people over hundreds of years have lived through worse political divides while still finding inspiration to create legendary art, birth beautiful babies, and break chains of generational trauma — there is a question of what to do with despair.

My short answer: theater.

If you regularly read my reviews (though I assume this is only my Uncle Lou), then you know how I harp on the word catharsis. Catharsis is a process of releasing and thereby providing relief from strong or repressed emotions. While many artists create to explore heightened states of being or heal from injury, audiences flock to it for the same reason. This is shown in the rundown of San Diego’s theater programming. In the past few weeks, Cygnet resurrected Other Desert Cities (about politics dividing a family), The Old Globe mounted Appropriate (adult siblings forced to face their late father’s racism), and La Jolla Playhouse launched 3 Summers of Lincoln (a musical about the president’s political navigations to abolish slavery).

Aristotle coined catharsis to describe the emotional healing found in tragic stories and moving music because this emotional purging causes humans to process their suffering. German playwright Bertolt Brecht took this a step forward, believing that ‘climatic catharsis’ of emotion left an audience complacent. He purposely wrote plays that did NOT resolve significant conflicts to force audiences toward social action to reach their necessary relief. 

One of Brecht’s most important principles was called Verfremdungseffekt (a translation: distancing effect), in which Brect employed techniques such as actors who directly address the audience, harsh stage lighting, and the use of songs to interrupt action, transposition of text to the third person or past tense, and speaking stage directions out loud. This was not avant-garde experimentation but the purposeful use of theatre to push live audiences away from mere thought exercises and toward action.

Brecht’s methods came to mind while watching lead actress Jackie Wilke playing Heidi Shreck in What the Constitution Means to Me last night at North Coast Repertory Theatre. She’d spent the show breaking the fourth wall to directly address the audience, but toward the end, she smiles at the light grid, and the stage brightens like a fluorescent rehearsal space. She takes a slapsticky step off the stage and says, “Hello, I’m Jacque Wilke.” In a seemingly unscripted moment, Wilke shared her personal pride in performing in this show because of her renewed belief in its importance as a new mother.

The show begins as a memory play, recalling the real experiences of playwright Heidi Shreck’s high school oratory contest speeches on the Constitution. The story zigs and zags combining memoir, a TedxTalk, debate, contemporary commentary, and personal improv — goading audiences to contemplate America’s foundational document, with a focus on the fact the Constitution still does not mention women.

Heidi reminds the audience of a statistic first stated by feminist activist Gloria Steinem: This century, more American women have been killed by their male partners than Americans have been killed in wars, including 9/11. Shreck’s script says, “That is not the number of women who have been killed by men in this country, that is only the women who were killed by the men who supposedly loved them. I find this statistic so overwhelming that I just kind of have to forget it to get through the day. Except, I think you can’t forget about it, right? I think even if you don’t know that statistic, the truth of that is there all the time. The truth of that rampant violence against women’s bodies is underneath everything all the time… Humming. Right?”

It’s the way she finishes statements with ‘right?’ that clinches this play’s ethos. It invites the audience — knowing 65% of American theater ticket buyers are female — to nod.

This original Broadway production was filmed for Amazon Prime, Tony Award-nominated for Best Play, a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, and is the most produced play in America this season. I believe its popularity stems from our collective craving to process America’s history, power structures, and its effects on citizens, and invites us to move beyond post-show cocktail conversation to reach something more lasting than catharsis.

NORTH COAST REPERTORY THEATRE presents
WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME

By Heidi Schrek
Directed by Shana Wride

North Coast Rep
987 Lomas Santa Fe Drive
Solana Beach, CA 92075

Previews: February 26, 2025
Opens: March 1, 2025
Closes: NOW EXTENDED to March 30, 2025