Kimberly Donovan Photo by Tracy Martin

That fascination with the Constitution and the love of a good argument under pressure evidently never went away as she became a playwright, actor, and screenwriter. So much so that Heidi Schreck premiered What the Constitution Means to Me in 2017 for the Wild Project in Clubbed Thumb's Off-Broadway festival, Summerworks. She went on to star on Broadway and at the Kennedy Center in her autobiographical play about those Constitutional debates, throwing in a parallel history of the last three generations of the women in her family and how her and their lives reflect the importance of certain of the Constitution's Amendments.

At a time when our nation and the Supreme Court itself is increasingly at odds at what the Constitution does and does not mean, Hillbarn Theatre & Conservatory is staging a high-energy, fascinatingly compelling, and often thought-provoking What the Constitution Means to Me. Convincingly, acclaimed actor and voiceover artist Kimberly Donovan takes on the first-person role of Heidi Schreck with no hint to the audience until near the closing moments that all she has revealed actually did not happen in her life, but instead in the life of the evening's absent, but very present, playwright.

As soon as Kimberly Donovan walks into the replicated, small-town America Legion hall decked with the portraits of decorated service vets (all men, all white)–the impressive set was designed by Jenna Forder–there can be no doubt that she is anyone but Heidi Schreck. Her personality sparkles with an excitement and conviction about the subject matter that is immediately contagious.

But the initial smiling and easygoing nature soon begins to show an edge as a deep-set intensity becomes more and more noticeable. Her pace quickens, her arms wave about suggesting she may take flight at any moment, and her voice rises to near bellowing at times. It soon becomes clear as she delves into her (remember, actually Heidi Schreck's) immense reserve of a lay person's knowledge about our Constitution and its history, that the passion she carries for its contents and their implications on her life is deep and felt to the core of her being.

Picking back up on a teen's fascination with the Salem witch trials, the revved-up enthusiast explains that the metaphor she likes to use for how she sees the Constitution–having such a central metaphor being one of the Legion's contest requirements–is that of a "crucible." For her, the honored document is like a "witch's caldron," "a pot in which you put many different ingredients and boil them together until they transform into something else." But she goes on to remind us that a "caldron" is also "a severe test of patience or belief." Altogether, the Constitution we are about to learn more about is touted to us with passion as a "radical document."

This all comes out as Kimberly Donovan reenacts the fifteen-year-old Heidi in one of the pressured speeches she once gave, a seven-minute-prepared oration, followed by extemporaneously speaking on one assigned amendment. While a stern-voiced, never-flinching veteran in uniform is on stage to be her strict timekeeper (played by Vincent Randazzo as Shreck's real-life friend, Danny Wolohan), we soon begin to see that the time limits will not restrain this eager bulldog from barreling through all the details she intends to relay to us about her views of this document, its creators, and subsequently the Supreme Court justices who have interpreted it through the past two centuries. In addition, she liberally takes us on side trips into her own upbringing and the lives and histories of the prior three generations of her family.

Employing big, toothy smiles, fingers that thrust their points for emphasis, and a voice that rises and falls like a wild roller coaster, fifteen-year-old Heidi focuses on the Ninth Amendment–one added in 1791 because the Founding Fathers realized, according to our informed speaker, that they could not include in this defining document all the specific rights that Americans should be allowed to have. Thus, they reserved those unnamed rights, including those not even imaginable at that time, through this addition.

The excitement of both the teenage Heidi and her now-emerging adult self becomes ever more acute as she relates the importance of this particular amendment to much later Supreme Court decisions, such as Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Roe v. Wade (1973), whereby women gained the respective rights of contraception and abortion based on the right of privacy–rights justices decided the Ninth Amendment protects. (Schreck's script includes what may have behind several of the nine justices' decisions in 1965 to allow birth control, an eyebrow-raising piece of historical gossip that may be the one sure thing everyone in the audience carries away from the evening's lecture-like play.)

As Heidi proceeds through her somewhat-timed speech and moves into "extemporaneously" talking about the 14th Amendment and its five clauses, more and more stories about the difficult history of her own family's women spill out–women who were often abused and/or witnessed abuse. These difficult episodes are peppered into her explanations of the Amendment's meanings and implications, with the clear conclusion by our playwright that "violence against women has been baked in historically," not only in world history and our country's history, but in her own family as one microcosm of that shameful heritage.

Other sidesteps the playwright takes have mixed effects and prevent the Heidi before us to retain some sense of focus as she attempts to build a case for some of the evening's insights and learnings. Stories about Heidi's favorite sock monkey as both a child and an adult and the actor's repeated demonstration of Schreck's inherited way of crying in bent-over heaves are cute and funny but add little to "what the constitution means to me." The same is true when she turns over the podium to the stone-faced vet and speech judge who takes off his uniform and transforms into a fellow actor now telling about his own childhood memory with his father–a moving story but quite unrelated to the evening's focus.

Heidi Schreck includes in her play a role for a local high school girl to take the stage and to debate whether the Constitution should be kept as is or be abolished and totally rewritten. Woodside High School student, Avery Hartman, already an accomplished actor in her own right, joins Kimberly Donovan in a scripted, very informative debate that, through the impressive skills of both, genuinely appears spontaneously to be created on the spot. (On alternative nights, Oakwood School's Miriam Shem-Tov is the teen debater, with one night the teen on stage taking the "Keep" side of the scripted debate; and the next, the "Abolish.")

After the fast-paced, impassioned debate between the two that includes audience participation of many voiced "yeas" and "nays" of points made by each, the way the two end their joint time on stage and thus the entire evening's performance turns out to be frankly very odd, totally off subject, and an energy deflator. This is not a director's choice but is in fact a part of Heidi Shreck's original script–something that I find surprising has remained a part of the evening after several years of performances coast-to-coast.

But apart from the ending, director Susannah Martin is to be commended for ensuring the evening's pace never misses a beat. Even with the many sidebars included in the script, the director and creative team find ways to regain our focus on the important subject at hand. Cameron Pence's excellent lighting design is a major catalyst in this effort as are the occasional, actual Supreme Court arguments we hear via Jeff Mockus' sound design.

Hillbarn Theatre & Conservatory should be commended for including the extremely timely and relevant What the Constitution Means to Me in their 85th season. Heidi Schreck has constructed a unique way to promote open discussion about the Constitution, its history of amendments, and their often negative impacts on our rights–especially the rights of women, Native Americans, and immigrants.

What the Constitution Means to Me runs through February 8, 2026, at Hillbarn Theatre & Conservatory, 1285 East Hillsdale Blvd., Foster City CA. For tickets and information, please visit www.hillbarntheatre.org or call 650-349-6411.