When Heidi Schreck was fourteen, her mother cajoled her into entering the American Legion Oratorical Contest, in which high-school students give speeches on the U.S. Constitution for prize money. This was 1986, in Wenatchee, Washington, a conservative-leaning town dotted with orchards, which calls itself the Apple Capital of the World. Schreck was, as she put it recently, an outgoing nerd—into ballet, self-tanning, Duran Duran, and boys. Her father, Larry, who voted Republican, was a beloved history teacher at her school. Her mother, Sherry, who voted Democratic, was a debate coach and drama teacher at a different school and ran a children’s-theatre group called the Short Shakespeareans, of which Heidi was the leading lady. “Between the ages of six and twelve, I played most of the great Shakespearean comedic heroines,” she told me.

The American Legion, a century-old veterans’ organization, began the contest, in 1938, to “develop deeper knowledge and appreciation for the U.S. Constitution among high-school students.” Its alumni include the former Republican Presidential candidate Alan Keyes and the conservative pundit Lou Dobbs. Each contestant must give an eight-to-ten-minute prepared oration, drawing personal connections between the document and her own life. Then, for three to five minutes, the contestant must speak extemporaneously about an article or an amendment selected from a container. In Schreck’s prepared speech, she compared the Constitution to a crucible, in which rights are “tested and tried” like ingredients in a witch’s cauldron. (The idea came from her mother, who taught a unit on Arthur Miller.) She had anecdotes on hand for every article and amendment. If she drew the First Amendment, for instance, she would recount how the girls in her eighth-grade class had protested a school policy against shorts by wearing them en masse, exercising their right to peaceably assemble.

“I really did believe there was no greater democracy on the planet, and that this document was the most genius piece of political writing that had ever been created,” Schreck recalled. She inherited this zeal from her father, who drilled her in the back seat of their Datsun hatchback on the way to competitions, which were held in Legion halls and judged by Legionnaires—typically, Second World War veterans in navy-blue caps and blazers. Schreck, who had braces, shoulder-length blond hair, and bangs that she teased out to look like Madonna’s in the “Lucky Star” video, wore an electric-blue suit with pantyhose and “sensible pumps.” “I remember being very conscious of the fact that my appearance was in contrast to my mind. That felt like my secret weapon, that I would have this blond big hair and lots of makeup and look very traditionally femme—and then debate these boys who were not expecting me to be as smart as I was,” she said. “Later, I realized what a trap that can be.”

By tenth grade, Schreck was competing in the regional championships, holding forth in halls smelling of cigar smoke in Spokane and Denver and Billings, like a standup comedian on tour. By eleventh grade, she was winning four-figure checks. When Scott Shinn, from Puyallup, Washington, was a sophomore, he saw Schreck’s picture in the American Legion newsletter after she won the Washington State contest, from which he had been eliminated. The following year, they went head to head in Walla Walla, and Schreck beat him. As Schreck recalls, “We were intense rivals and also kind of in love with each other.” Her mother, who has saved every scrap of her children’s ephemera, recently recovered a letter in which Shinn wrote to Schreck, “I just want you to know that if you won the whole damn thing, I’m gonna burn your house down O.K.?” “I guess it was a little flirtatious,” Shinn, who is now a computer programmer in Seattle, told me.

In 1989, her senior year, Schreck competed in the national semifinals, held in Sacramento, but lost to a girl named Becky, whose speech, as Schreck recalls, compared the Constitution to a patchwork quilt. Schreck, who came in second, won four thousand dollars, which she added to her four years of winnings. By the time she was accepted at the University of Oregon, she had saved enough to pay much of her college tuition.

Almost two decades later, in 2007, when Schreck was a thirty-six-year-old stage actress and playwright living in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, with her husband, the theatre director Kip Fagan, she was asked to perform a short piece for an avant-garde variety night at the East Village venue P.S. 122. She was supporting herself teaching English as a second language and acting in “weird downtown theatre.” A mood of weary defiance had enveloped the Off Broadway scene, which responded to the George W. Bush years with antiwar dramas and sardonic performance art about the Patriot Act. Schreck thought back to the oratorical contest and its prompt to talk about how the Constitution related to her own life. She recalls wondering, “What if I did that as an adult woman? What would it actually mean to do one of these contests in a way that wasn’t just about selling the idea of America or buying into American exceptionalism or just trying to win?”

The result was a ten-minute piece, directed by Fagan, which Schreck titled “What the Constitution Means to Me.” “For some reason, people really liked it,” she said. The Villager described it as “a wake up call not only about the erosion of liberties in response to fear, but also about the less than glorious history of the myth that is America.” In 2012, a theatre production company commissioned her to expand it into a full-length play. In 2017, Schreck performed the longer version for ten days, as part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival, at an eighty-nine-seat theatre in the East Village. In the show, which combined memoir and civics lesson, she interrogated her teen-age reverence for a document that was written by and for white male property owners. At one point, she played an audio recording from the 1965 Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut, in which the petitioner, Estelle Griswold, had been arrested for dispensing birth control at a clinic in New Haven. Justice William O. Douglas, in his majority opinion, drew on a number of amendments, including the First and the Ninth, to construe a “right to privacy” between husband and wife which made contraception legal for married couples and set a precedent for the majority decision in Roe v. Wade, eight years later. In the recording, Douglas and Griswold’s lawyer, Thomas I. Emerson, both spend a lot of time coughing in embarrassment.

After playing the recording, Schreck told a story from when she was twenty-one: Her mother was driving her to Seattle, and Schreck asked her to pull over, so that she could throw up. While starring in a production of “Miss Julie” in Seattle that summer, Schreck had had a fling with the actor playing Jean, the valet, and was pregnant. She and the actor were secretly about to leave for Eugene, Oregon, to go to the Feminist Women’s Health Collective—which, as she recalled, was run by lesbians and was “clearly the best place on the planet to get an abortion.” She told the audience that, after she vomited, her mother was “breathing fast . . . like she’s having a panic attack, and suddenly she opens her mouth and shouts ‘You’d better not be pregnant!’ and I shout back ‘I’M NOT PREGNANT!’ ”