I watched this on Amazon Prime, where it continues to be available. It is a filmed performance from 2019 when the show was performed on Broadway, directed by Marielle Heller.
I have been excited about this play since I first heard Heidi Schreck talk about it on Brian Koppelman’s podcast, The Moment. There is an energy about the way she spoke about the play, and the awe with which Brian described it, that intrigued me. Framed around Schreck’s real life story of travelling around the US debating on the constitution to win prize money to pay for college, what begins as an almost too-real personal confession, quickly spins into a deep and scathing indictment of the treatment of women throughout American history.
Schreck’s performance is singular in its simplicity. She rarely feels performative, even when we see her as her 15 year old self. She is raw and honest in her storytelling. The convention for how the story is told shifts repeatedly, peeling back layers of artifice until we reach the final third of the play which is no longer a play, but a live debate of ideas between two fierce debaters. So rooted in the ancient Greek agon, this is simultaneously the most and least theatrical aspect of the play.
The design is simple, the space does not change but instead the people within the space change and modernize, a stunning metaphor for the old structures which we moden humans must live within, outmoded, but still what we’ve got — the perfect setting for a debate on whether we should continue, or burn it down and start again.
This is a timely watch.