Fifteen, a photo essay

June 3, 2019June 20, 2019 Victoria Myers 17536 Views Heidi Schreck

June 3^rd, 2019

Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me ends with a dream ballet. You may have heard that it ends with a debate. But I am telling you: it ends with a dream ballet. Here’s what happens: after the debate, the lights dim and Heidi and her young debate partner—either Rosdely Ciprian or Thursday Williams—sit on the edge of Rachel Hauck’s diorama box of a set, outside of the walls of portraits of men from the past, and they ask each other questions. Three each. Always ending with Heidi asking, “What do you imagine your life will be like in X number of years?” (the years change, the question remains the same.) Those last minutes of the play are so deeply moving, such an explosion of wanting, and such a strong sensation of feeling your feelings exist outside of your body that it rivals anything Agnes de Mille ever created. It is a dream ballet.

There are three times in What the Constitution Means to Me where Schreck asks us to imagine something different. At the beginning of the play, as her fifteen-year-old self, she posits that the Ninth Amendment was the Founders’ way of imagining a future they did not yet know. Later, no longer fifteen but instead her adult self, she asks us to imagine that the play’s set has gone away and changed into something entirely different. And then, finally, she asks a young woman to imagine—not hope, but imagine—her life in the future. It is a deceptively simple question at the end of an exceedingly sophisticated structural sleight of hand where the play’s protagonist moves from a future imagined by others towards a future imagined by herself—and then one final twist of pulling the past into the future by asking, “What about you?”

I had a friend who used to make a wish every time she looked at a clock and it read 11:11. For a while I did it too, until I realized how often I was just wishing for someone to answer an e-mail or a text; for that first domino to fall in a conversation I was already plotting in my head where if they said that thing, I’d be able to say this thing. It began to strike me as both a pathetic thing to waste a wish on and a pathetic thing to feel the need to wish for in the first place. I used to—and sometimes still do—sit in bed at night and imagine the conversations I would have with people where we would just sit and talk and they would ask me questions and I would be able to say what I actually wanted, instead of what I tended to do in life which was to make a joke or change the subject or just float along on a sea of sterile, beige conversation.

Endings are notoriously difficult. They can seem out of place or somehow tacked on, like the author simply ran out of ideas. But I think there is no other way that Schreck’s play could end. And maybe asking, “What do you imagine your life will be like?” is exactly what the play was driving towards from the very beginning.

I guess what I am trying to say is the ending of What the Constitution Means to Me, where two people sit and ask each other questions is what I imagined, and maybe you did, too.

Inspired by What the Constitution Means to Me, we asked 15 photographers from around the country to photograph teenagers in their communities ranging in age from 13 to 20. Each photographer chose their own subject and submitted work reflective of their point of view. We then asked all the teens, “What do you imagine your life will be like in fifteen years?” — Victoria Myers

Adriana Oribio photographed by Trinidad Oribio