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Maya Keleher (Alice Paul) and company in the First National Tour of\u00a0Suffs\u00a0in 2025.<\/p>\n
Joan Marcus<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t take Rachel Sussman quite as long to get her idea for a musical about the women\u2019s suffrage movement to Broadway<\/a> as it did for the suffragists to win the right to vote. The latter struggle lasted more than 70 years, launched with a \u201cDeclaration of Sentiments\u201d at an 1848 convention organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.<\/p>\n Sussman spent a mere decade landing\u00a0Suffs at the center of American theater. But the producer whose previous credits include Tony nominee and Pulitzer finalist What the Constitution Means to Me<\/a>\u00a0had been obsessed with the suffrage movement since she was 12.<\/p>\n \u201cI first encountered the history when I was in middle school,\u201d Sussman says in an interview a couple of weeks before\u00a0Suffs\u00a0wraps up its first national tour with a stop in North Texas. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n 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\u2019s attention and went on a hunger strike in jail that included forced feeding and almost killed Paul.\u00a0Suffs\u00a0covers that relatively short period.\u00a0<\/p>\n A filmed version of the musical was recently shown on PBS.<\/p>\n I talked to Sussman over Zoom about the show\u2019s journey, how she chose composer Shaina Taub to write it and why she still was so riveted by the fight for women\u2019s right to vote all these years later.<\/p>\n What did you find out about Paul and Burns that kept you so interested in their story?<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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, \u201cI have an idea, and I think you’re the right person to bring it to life. What do you know about women’s suffrage?\u201d Her answer was, “What most people’s is, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 19th Amendment.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019 book,\u00a0Jailed for Freedom, the only firsthand account of the radical end of the movement, the National Woman’s Party.<\/p>\n The next morning I woke up at 5 a.m. with an email from her, and the subject line was just \u201cYes.\u201d She was like, “We have to do this.\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n I had the phrase \u201cinherently dramatic\u201d in my notes. One of Shaina\u2019s lyrics reflects the movement\u2019s conservative approach before the National Woman\u2019s Party: \u201cState by state, slow and steady, not until the country’s ready.\u201d But Paul and Burns had had enough of that. Yet like most musicals,<\/strong>\u00a0Suffs<\/strong> took many years to reach the stage. What was the development process like?<\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2019s the story? How do we open Act One, what’s the ending? And then the next year, we focused on Act Two.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n We partnered with the Public Theater, which is a very prestigious nonprofit theater in New York, and premiered it there in 2022.<\/p>\n Joyce Meimei Zheng (Ruza Wenclawska) and company in the first national tour of Suffs.\u00a0<\/p>\n Joan Marcus<\/p>\n Was the composer mostly on her own? Who was she getting feedback from? How did it get shaped?<\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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\u2019t clear to me. What do you mean by this moment? And there was also Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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