We had just caught our breaths and settled into our seats with our playbills for the hit Broadway show “What the Constitution Means to Me” when we heard a stirring in the crowd. A small entourage walked down the aisle to our right. There, between two large men wired with walkie-talkies, was none other than Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I could have touched her from my aisle seat.
It was June, 2019. By now, the whole audience was aware of her presence. As she made her way to her seat, there was a swelling sound of excited conversation, and then a sudden eruption of applause that went on for a short while and just as quickly died down. People were standing to get a better view, some taking pictures with their phones.
“I hate that,” my daughter said.
“What?” I asked.
“How people get so rude when they see someone famous,” she said.
“She’s become a real New Yorker,” I thought. I restrained myself from standing when I tried to take my own picture of RBG sitting six rows in front of me, invisible behind the two Secret Service agents standing directly behind her, eyes scanning the audience.
The crowd quieted, and a few minutes later the lights went down.
Heidi Schreck’s autobiographical play portrays her experience as a 15-year-old girl competing in the iconic American Legion speech contests on the meaning of the Constitution. As she reenacts this time in her life, she periodically steps out of the story to comment on how her teenage understanding evolved over the years from uncritical reverence to a more nuanced view of the Constitution — an imperfect document, drafted by time-bound privileged white men to codify their aspirations for a free society and also to protect their interests, a document that amendments and Supreme Court interpretations have incrementally flexed and adapted to a changing world, and that somehow still inspires deep pride and hope.
As promised by the reviews, it was compelling theater, and it certainly held my attention. But so did my awareness throughout the evening of our special fellow audience member. I wasn’t just sharing this experience with my wife, daughter and random strangers. We were witnessing this play about the bedrock of our country’s system of government with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
I wasn’t alone in that awareness. At one point in the script, Schreck said, “Nobody really knows much about the 14th Amendment.” And then, almost like an afterthought, she turned to look directly at Justice Ginsburg: “Except, maybe, one person in this room.” The audience howled.
But the real standout moment came later. Twice up to then, we’d heard over the sound system audio recordings of Supreme Court hearings, with male justices arguing arcane points of law (“does ‘shall’ mean ‘will’ or does ‘shall’ mean ‘may’?”), while chillingly missing the forest for the trees in cases of brutal domestic violence and murder.
This was near the end of the play. Schreck was pulling on the thread of hope and progress in the evolving interpretation of the Constitution. RBG’s voice suddenly crackled to life and filled the theater. “When will there be enough women on the Court?” she said. “My answer is, when there are nine.”
The audience burst into a sustained standing ovation, with everyone, including the actors on stage, turning to face the tiny woman in Row E. The ovation continued loudly for what seemed like minutes. It felt different to me from any other applause I’ve been part of. It seemed to hold an urgent awareness of the fraught political moment we were in together, two and a half years into the Trump presidency, seven months after the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. Awareness, too, I imagined, of the recipient’s fragile health, as if our applause could fill her with enough gratitude and life force to keep her going for another 18 months, please, at least until Inauguration Day.
It didn’t succeed in that last hope, of course. It’s been over 17 months, and a very different justice has replaced RBG on the Supreme Court. All over the country, Americans are thinking anew about what the Constitution means to us: an inviolable founding document that can finally be exorcised of activist overreach? Or a dynamic guide whose evolution may be entering a dark time of reversals and restrictions on hard-won rights?
For myself, the answer to that question is surely informed by that June evening in New York, when 600 people spontaneously stood together to celebrate a quiet, persistent, brilliant woman unexpectedly in our midst. With no illusions about its limitations, the Constitution inspired in her a lifetime dedicated to expanding its promise to be more fully and truly what at its heart she believed it was meant to be. That gives me reason to hope.
Matthew Haas lives in Northampton.