Maya Keleher (Alice Paul) and company in the First National Tour of Suffs in 2025.
Joan Marcus
It didn’t take Rachel Sussman quite as long to get her idea for a musical about the women’s suffrage movement to Broadway as it did for the suffragists to win the right to vote. The latter struggle lasted more than 70 years, launched with a “Declaration of Sentiments” at an 1848 convention organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.
Sussman spent a mere decade landing Suffs at the center of American theater. But the producer whose previous credits include Tony nominee and Pulitzer finalist What the Constitution Means to Me had been obsessed with the suffrage movement since she was 12.
“I first encountered the history when I was in middle school,” Sussman says in an interview a couple of weeks before Suffs wraps up its first national tour with a stop in North Texas. “I was flabbergasted partially because my textbook only had two paragraphs about it, starting with Seneca Falls and ending with women getting the right to vote. I thought there has to be more to it.”
Article continues below this ad
Her research led her to Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, who broke from the leading suffragists of their time to found their own party and radicalize the movement. They protested daily in front of the White House in an attempt to grab President Woodrow Wilson’s attention and went on a hunger strike in jail that included forced feeding and almost killed Paul. Suffs covers that relatively short period.
A filmed version of the musical was recently shown on PBS.
I talked to Sussman over Zoom about the show’s journey, how she chose composer Shaina Taub to write it and why she still was so riveted by the fight for women’s right to vote all these years later.
What did you find out about Paul and Burns that kept you so interested in their story?
These women were pioneers of protest in our country. They had gone over to London to help with the British suffrage movement and learned all these tactics of nonviolence, direct action and civil disobedience, and took that back to the States.
Article continues below this ad
They were the first to ever picket the White House. It was so unprecedented that nobody knew what to do with them. The way they went on a hunger strike, burned President Wilson in effigy, it just felt so inherently dramatic. The stakes were so high, I thought this history is ripe for theatrical adaptation.
When I became a producer years later, it made its way back to the front of my mind, and I thought, who would be the right kind of artist to tell this story? Shaina Taub was an up-and-coming songwriter on the scene. She was doing concerts of her own music at venues across New York. We ran in some of the same social circles because we’d both gone to New York University. I wrote to her and said, “I have an idea, and I think you’re the right person to bring it to life. What do you know about women’s suffrage?” Her answer was, “What most people’s is, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 19th Amendment.”
I said to her, do you know that Susan B. Anthony was long dead when women got the right to vote, and it took three generations? I introduced her to Alice Paul and Carrie Catt and Ida B. Wells and gave her Doris Stevens’ book, Jailed for Freedom, the only firsthand account of the radical end of the movement, the National Woman’s Party.
The next morning I woke up at 5 a.m. with an email from her, and the subject line was just “Yes.” She was like, “We have to do this.” She had been searching for a story about girls trying to change the world and had been gender flipping other stories, and here this one was in her own backyard. It became our mission to get it on stage. Along the way, the spine revealed itself to us. The main conflict was not between the suffragists and President Wilson, because that felt too easy and obvious. It was about internal conflict, people with the exact same goal but opposing methods for how to achieve it, and how that tension is so much more interesting and theatrical.
I had the phrase “inherently dramatic” in my notes. One of Shaina’s lyrics reflects the movement’s conservative approach before the National Woman’s Party: “State by state, slow and steady, not until the country’s ready.” But Paul and Burns had had enough of that. Yet like most musicals, Suffs took many years to reach the stage. What was the development process like?
Shaina started writing in earnest in 2016. She really wanted to be an expert on the history, so she dove in. It was actually during the election that she wrote the first song. It was all about musical moments first, because her impulses are as a songwriter. When she had about eight songs in her arsenal, we got some actors together to hear them out loud. That was in early 2018. Then she went through a process of writing chronologically. What’s the story? How do we open Act One, what’s the ending? And then the next year, we focused on Act Two.
Article continues below this ad
We partnered with the Public Theater, which is a very prestigious nonprofit theater in New York, and premiered it there in 2022.
Joyce Meimei Zheng (Ruza Wenclawska) and company in the first national tour of Suffs.
Joan Marcus
Was the composer mostly on her own? Who was she getting feedback from? How did it get shaped?
There were a couple voices guiding her. Shaina took on book, music and lyrics, writing all three elements, and then also was going to star as Alice Paul. It’s a lot on one person’s shoulders, she didn’t have a sparring partner, so she had to trust in her collaborators. We had an incredible director, Leigh Silverman, who’s also a dramaturge, as well as myself and my producing partner Jill Furman. We were able to take a step back and think of it more objectively. We were not in the weeds in the same way Shaina or our director was. We were able to ask questions and poke holes, like this isn’t clear to me. What do you mean by this moment? And there was also Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public.
Was it a hard sell, especially for Broadway, which is so expensive to produce?
Article continues below this ad
It was a really easy sell at the Public. It sort of came off of their legacy with Hamilton, even though I think it’s so different. But you know, in a reductive sense, sure, it’s similar. It’s one author, she stars in it and it’s about history.
The Public became an opportunity for us to put the show on and have a paying audience for the first time after doing development that was very internal. We learned a lot and we got a lot of constructive criticism. Sometimes in our business, when folks do that first production and it isn’t a home run, a 10 out of 10 immediately, some just throw in the towel and say, “Well, we tried.” In our case, we thought this is really helpful. Now we want to do more work to make it as good as it can possibly be, and we spent another two years developing it.
What were the issues? What changes did Shaina make?
Initially, the show was more sung-through. There wasn’t a lot of book or scenes with dialogue. It had a recitative quality. What we found is, those book scenes are really important in the structure of a musical because they give the audience time to catch their breath. They get so much information. Once the train leaves the station, you’re on a ride for a while. We learned that it was such a workout for people, they weren’t necessarily able to lean back and let the music wash over them. So we went from this sung-through quality to developing book scenes where you would hear a song and then you would watch a scene, and then you would hear another song and so on. That ultimately paid off so brilliantly because Shaina won the Tony Award for best book.
In addition, there is so much to suffrage history, we didn’t want to leave anything out — all the coolest, nerdiest facts. But it was just too much width. We were trying to encapsulate too much of the movement, and we needed to get even more specific around the most important relationships, so that we could ensure the audience cared about our main characters. I like to say it went from width to depth. In turn, we were able to see the payoff. At the end of Act One, there’s a huge event that fractures the main group and haunts Alice, and we wanted that to feel earned.
Article continues below this ad
One of the things that makes Suffs work so well is that it moves briskly through the plot points, doesn’t get hung up on a lot of exposition, and spends more time on the motivations of the characters, even their inner thoughts. It humanizes the struggle. You get all of the details, but you almost don’t notice that you’re being fed the plot. What you end up with is this story about a really interesting group of people.
While I am like the No. 1 suffrage nerd, like I love all of those fun facts, it’s actually much more compelling to just give people a taste and then have them after the show go out and discover all of that on their own. I have seen more people Google Inez Milholland because they wonder, “Was she a real person? Did all of that really happen?” And rather than you continue to beat that over the head, let them go on that journey and discover how extraordinary and human these women really were on their own.
When you were doing your research in middle school, what was the “a-ha” moment?
That there had been women before me and throughout history in our country who have defied all odds and tried to change the world at any cost. In jail, they asked to be treated as political prisoners. How absolutely radical that was that they were putting their bodies on the line. They were willing to die for what they believed in, and it made me think: Am I willing to die for something I believe in?
Alice Paul had the genius idea that they should all wear white to the march because it would stand out in photographs. Now when we think of women’s suffrage, we think of women wearing white. She was a publicity mastermind.
Marya Grandy (Carrie Chapman Catt) and company in the First National Tour of Suffs.
Joan Marcus
It’s a bittersweet story. Everything doesn’t get wrapped up neatly. There’s an amazing scene near the end when Ida Wells and Mary Church Terrell realize this isn’t a personal victory. Black women and Black men aren’t going to get to vote in large numbers for years.
Article continues below this ad
This was an unfinished fight. I think a lot of folks assume the 19th Amendment gave everyone the right to vote. It actually doesn’t even say the word “women.” While in theory it should have included women of color, in particular Black women were left behind for many, many years, Native American women, Chinese American women.
We’re on the verge of the 100-year anniversary of the musical as we know it. Why has it taken so long for this story to be told successfully in this most American of art forms?
Women’s stories are not given the same attention generally. We haven’t held the pen of history. This came out just over 100 years after the 19th Amendment was passed. It needed to feel like it really had been in our past. Even though, frankly, I think we often talk about history like it’s something that now is over when we’re still living in it.
The story of women’s suffrage has now turned into a story of voting rights and women’s rights, because stories that center on women and what women experience often are seen as only for one half of the population. When actually they’re for everyone in the same way that stories that center on male protagonists are for everyone. I hope Suffs continues to make that argument.
Details
Aug. 4-9 at Bass Performance Hall, 525 Commerce St., Fort Worth. $50-$144. basshall.com.