Heidi Schreck

Heidi Schreck is a playwright, screenwriter, and actress whose play What the Constitution Means to Me ran on Broadway for 183 shows, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and earned Schreck nominations for the Tony Award for Best Play and Best Actress in a Play.

“I first performed this little show a decade ago, for an audience of maybe 20 people, mostly friends. I’ve performed it during presidential elections, Supreme Court hearings, marches and protests. Every time I walk out there, the world has changed. I never quite know what is going to happen,” she says.

What the Constitution Means to Me begins as a recreation of the constitutional debate contests she entered as a 15-year-old to pay for college. The play then explodes into a deeply personal, intergenerational questioning of this foundational text.

Before becoming an actress and writer, Schreck lived in Siberia teaching English, then worked in St. Petersburg as a journalist. Her other plays include Creature, There Are No More Big Secrets, The Consultant, Grand Concourse, and, most recently, an adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. She is the recipient of the 2018 Hull-Warriner Award and co-winner of the 2019 Horton Foote Playwriting Award. She won the Smithsonian magazine American Ingenuity Award in 2019. Schreck now lives in Brooklyn, where she is converting Belle Burden’s book Strangers into a screenplay for Gwyneth Paltrow.