In the 5th and D Street Theatre, Natasha Samuelsen stands in the spotlight explaining the tenets of the 14th Amendment to the five people sitting in the dark during dress rehearsal. As the main character in Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me, she enthuses over the enshrining of naturalized citizenship with the hard smile of a 15 year old, inhabiting the playwright’s first-person account of delivering speeches about the Constitution as part of a scholarship program. Her toothy rigor slips at the caveats about the women and Native people left out of the language and the abuses of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and her youthful enthusiasm drops as she recounts the grim stories of the abuse women in Schreck’s family faced.
Outside the theater, the 14th Amendment is on even shakier ground: Due process, naturalized citizenship and the right to privacy that was the bedrock of the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy are all under attack by the Trump administration.
One of the handful of people in the theater is director Peggy Metzger. When the board of the Redwood Curtain Theatre reads through prospective plays, she explains, “What we look for in a script are stories that have never been told,” at least locally or on screen, especially those from marginalized communities. What the Constitution Means to Me speaks explicitly to the legal subjugation of and violence against women, particularly the author’s mother’s experiences in an abusive home and the scant protection our laws have given women and minorities. But the play, written in response to the first Trump presidency, was not a shoe-in.
Metzger says that when her collaborators were making their choices, they believed Kamala Harris would be the next president. With a dark laugh, she says they didn’t foresee how endangered the Constitution would be or how many of the edits they would make — statistics and U.S. Supreme Court decisions for which the author has made allowances for updates — would be about the erosion of our rights, like the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the worsening violence against women. “You can’t not address the fact that’s changed.”
And yet, she says, the show is ultimately hopeful. When she says it is “encouraging, I mean ‘to give courage.'”
Once it was on the schedule, Metzger knew Samuelsen, with whom she’s worked on and off for 35 years, was the woman for the job. “It is almost a one-woman show,” Metzger says, noting the main character is joined only by the timekeeping Legionnaire (William English III) at stage right and a high school debater (Brooklyn Burns) who comes on stage in the second act. Most of the 90 minutes is monologue that swings between humor, nerdy charm and gut-punching intensity. “It’s not something you do unless you have the right actress for the show.”
Perched on the edge of the stage after rehearsal, Samuelsen explains how she had been avoiding the news and the attendant cycle of rage and hopelessness it tends to pull her into. The show — including reading the script every night to memorize her lines — has brought her back into political conversation. Some of the material is difficult for her to get through without crying, she says, especially the section about Jessica Gonzales, whose abusive husband kidnapped and murdered their three young daughters while police refused to enforce the restraining order she had filed against him. After having read up on the case, she says, “It’s so much worse.”
Still, Samuelsen says, “I haven’t left [rehearsals] sad. It’s been empowering to be with mostly strong women but one gentle, kind man.” She sends a smile to English, who pinkens a little. Metzger, she says, announced early on that a main priority was to make Samuelsen safe, a goal her castmates and crew seconded.
“The words I say, I agree with them,” Samuelsen says of Schreck’s script, “and wish I was smart enough to say them.”
“It started very personal and as we went through the process, it became more of an act of resistance.” — Peggy Metzger
English, too, feels an affinity for his role and both the toxic and positive role models of masculinity his character addresses in a monologue. “Some of those things … I feel like I’ve experienced as well,” he says, adding he appreciates that Schreck leaves the conclusion “open ended.”
Sixteen-year-old Brooklyn Burns of Eureka High School’s debate team, seated between Samuelsen and English, crosses her Converse high tops and explains how entrenched in politics she feels as a girl with friends who are trans. She says she finds herself relating to Schreck’s stories as she navigates growing up while worrying about her own safety in a way her brother and male friends don’t have to, whether walking to her car or being at home alone. “It’s become just so normal that girls can’t do things alone,” she says, without the safety of numbers or an accompanying male.
“This play does mean a lot to me. I know this could seem boring for us as teenagers,” Burns says, but she hopes her friends will give it a chance and connect to it as she did, maybe have some important conversations.
“It’s been really an interesting journey for me. … We did a lot of just talking,” Metzger says, with the cast members reading and sharing their own experiences. “It started very personal and as we went through the process, it became more of an act of resistance.” That political turn is a natural one for theater, she says, part of its history and societal function, as when Berthold Brecht and Vàclav Havel wrote under authoritarian regimes. “Theater is protest because it’s a whole bunch of people in a room together in solidarity about these issues,” she says, “but also entertainment.”
Metzger, who was at the Humboldt County Courthouse for the Labor Day 50501 Workers Over Billionaires protest against the Trump administration earlier in the day, says a friend recently asked her what she thought such protests accomplish. It’s similar, she says, to what theater has historically offered against authoritarianism.
“It gives us courage to speak out,” says Metzger, “If I see other people speaking out, it gives me courage.”
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the managing editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 ext. 106, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky @jfumikocahill.bsky.social.
This article appears in The Grand Jury Reports.