A ‘Constitution’ amendment
Maria Dizzia to launch national tour of Schreck’s ‘Constitution’
‘I deeply trust her,’ says Heidi Schreck of Maria Dizzia, who will replace her on tour.
When Heidi Schreck’s hit Broadway play “What the Constitution Means to Me” launches its national tour in L.A. next year, it will star her friend Maria Dizzia.
The Tony Award nominee for the 2009 play “In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)” will lead the first two stops of the “Constitution” tour: Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum (Jan. 12 through Feb. 16) and Chicago’s Broadway Playhouse (March 4 through April 12).
When Schreck was first rehearsing “Constitution” at New York Theatre Workshop, she called on Dizzia to help fine-tune her performance — tips that later led to Schreck’s Tony nomination in the lead actress category.
“I needed a remarkable, compelling actress with a mix of vulnerability and strength, and I find [Dizzia] riveting to watch onstage,” Schreck told The Times. “She knows the play because she’s seen every iteration of it and she’s coached me through it as an actress. But I also admire her as an artist and a human being. I deeply trust her.”
Dizzia called her upcoming gig an ambitious undertaking.
“I have a lot of work ahead of me, but I’m really excited about it,” she said. “Even when I first saw it at Clubbed Thumb, I was bowled over by Heidi’s artistry, as a writer and actor. For me, the challenge of bringing that emotional honesty every night feels like an opportunity for me to grow as an actor.”
In the unconventional play, Schreck recalled how she earned money for college by giving speeches on the Constitution in debate competitions. She told the audience that she would play her “psychotically polite” teenage self and attempt to re-create that speech from memory. Later in the show, Schreck became her present-day self and confronted how the Constitution does not inherently aim to protect women at any age.
To maintain the memoir-like framing of the piece, Dizzia will play Schreck first as an optimistic 15-year-old and then as a disillusioned 47-year-old. Dizzia also will find a moment to pause the play, address the audience as herself, and share her own story related to constitutional rights.
“I think there’s a great opportunity here in that someone can, at some point in the show, say, ‘I have my own experience with this as well,’” director Oliver Butler told The Times in June. “I hope it’s an additional layer of metatheater in a piece about becoming one’s true self. If it’s true that other people doing the role is both moving for that person and other people seeing it, and that it doesn’t hinge solely on Schreck telling her story herself, that’s just great added value for the play.”
Dizzia is working with Schreck to create that monologue, one that allows the actress to share a truth with the audience and transition back into the role of Heidi.
Dizzia will be joined for the Los Angeles and Chicago engagements by original Broadway cast members Mike Iveson and Rosdely Ciprian. A casting director has begun the monthlong process of finding a local debater who identifies as a young person of color. Dizzia goes head-to-head with one of the teens in the play’s thirdact debate about whether the country should keep the Constitution or replace it.
This is the part of the play that intimidates Dizzia most. Although she has debate experience — she was on her high school’s debate team and Model United Nations team — she admitted that she struggled with it at the time.
“It was a nut I really didn’t crack because I was a very emotional debater,” she told The Times. “I went to an all-girls school, and when I was debating someone from an all-boys school about abortion, I was so overwhelmed that I started crying. Our teacher had to remove me from the debate and replace me with someone else and gave me a look as if to say, ‘This is not how hearts and minds are won.’
“One of the things I love about the play is how it speaks to an audience who may not be on their side and how it lays out the experience of women in a way that allows people to understand an experience they may not have had themselves.”
And after performing “Constitution” for two years, Schreck is finally going on vacation: to Italy for a few weeks with her husband.