Welcome to Author Insights! Ever wonder what goes on in the mind of a playwright? In this series, you get a rare and exciting opportunity to hear directly from the authors themselves. Each article offers personal insights from the playwright, giving you a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process, character motivations, and thematic explorations that bring their scripts to life.
Below, you’ll find a downloadable blog post offering valuable insights directly from the author of Reconstitution. The downloaded PDF also includes supplemental classroom activities to help you connect the play’s themes and characters with your students.
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Reconstitution: a founding debate for a fractured America
Mitch Emoff
Reconstitution was originally written in 2009 about the framers of the US Constitution coming back in time and witnessing first-hand that our country had veered off track from its original founding principles. It was one of those situations you hear about where a novice author had a story brewing inside themselves that had to come out one way or another.
This story started as a 100-page script that was too short to be a novel. It was also sparse on description and written in present tense. A mentor of mine said it was meant to be a screenplay. My mother told me that it sounded like a stage play. I took the advice of the professional and converted the ‘novella’ into a screenplay in 2011.
The goal of the framers in the story was to navigate a modern society and ‘wake up’ the citizens about fiscal responsibility. That’s right… fiscal responsibility. Not exactly an emotive topic that motivates audience to stand up and to scream out ‘tyranny!’, unless it’s about the $20 they just paid to see the movie. But this was the topic of the times (remember the Tea Party movement?), and so it was written.
From there, I did what any good aspiring author would do. I sat on the script for 13 years and a miracle happened. Nothing really changed in the me, but a lot changed in the world. The stakes seemed much higher as our political climate changed from a focus on fiscal responsibility to several emotive themes that tore apart our country’s harmony: censorship, reparations for slavery, gun control, and religious liberties. I knew it was time to bring the story our founding fathers back to life loaded with current events that were as controversial and divisive as they were timely.
My hope was to add some comic relief to the story, not only to highlight the framers’ reaction to a very changed world today, but also making the three-hundred-year-old characters more relatable fellow human beings by having their own banter and petty disagreements, ala their differing quirks in 1787. Make no mistake, my main hope has always been to initiate a rigorous debate about very serious and consequential topics, one which the audience would feel as if they were participating themselves.
This level of ‘live’ debate is not possible through a novel or even a movie. I realize now that my mother knew best all along. The story, Reconstitution, was converted to a stage play to be performed in real time with the audience evaluating for themselves if our Constitution has stood the test of time or if our country has evolved so much since our original founding that we must scrap everything and start again. For in the end, much as was the intention at our country’s inception, the decision about what our republic is to be should be based solely on the collective will of the people.