Last night I saw Suffs, the emotionally moving and often infuriating new musical by Shaina Taub about the struggle to pass the 19th amendment.
Taub is one of New York City's most talented songwriters, and has long been supported by The Public Theater, which produced her musical adaptations of Twelfth Night and As You Like It in Central Park.
The Public Theater staged Suffs Off-Broadway prior to its transfer to the Music Box on 45th Street. The same company originated Hamilton, and comparisons between Suffs and that show are inevitable. Both musicals opted to feature their creators onstage as the play's protagonist and both utilized history in order to talk about contemporary politics.
While Hamilton was born out of the multi-cultural optimism of the Obama years, Suffs speaks to the anger, impatience, and exhaustion of our present moment. Taub stars as Alice Paul, the Quaker activist who both drove and divided the women's suffrage movement, engaging in militant protests and hunger strikes to try to embarrass the very politicians her movement needed to pass a constitutional amendment.
Suffs shows Paul first idolizing then clashing with Carrie Chapman Catt, played brilliantly by Jenn Colella. A mentee of the great Susan B. Anthony, Catt patiently built a movement that gathered support state by state, making slow and steady progress toward needed reform. In the show's opening number, "Let Mother Vote," she engages in folksy, non-threatening rhetoric aimed at winning over the American mainstream.
Though Catt welcomes the firebrand Paul into the feminist fold, it doesn't take long for Paul to George Clooney her mentor in the back. Paul forms her own National Woman's Party, funded by the multi-millionaire socialite Alva Belmont, played by Emily Skinner. Belmont happily bankrolls a team of professional activists, including Polish-American socialist Ruza Wenclawska, played by Kim Blanck. Historically, by the way, Wenclawska later appeared on Broadway in Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms.
A combination of left-wing extremism, elite monied interests, and showbiz glamor isn't attractive to everyone. Paul and her mostly white organization fails to win over Ida B. Wells, the legendary African-American journalist played powerfully by Nikki M. James. Though Wells is absolutely right about basically everything, her my-way-or-the-highway attitude mirrors that of the racist white Southerners she opposes and makes compromise impossible. A different (and perhaps more productive) course is charted by Mary Church Terrell, played by the wonderful Anastacia McCleskey.
Terrell, a graduate of Oberlin College, when told that because of her race she can't march with her state delegation at a national event, instead marches with a contingent of collegiate groups. This creative solution allows her to maintain her dignity (and get in a not-so-subtle dig against the racists) while neither engaging in nor provoking a pointless boycott. It's the type of political pragmatism that seems all-too-lacking in contemporary America.
In the play, Terrell notes that she assisted in the founding of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority at Howard University, which her daughter Phyllis (played by Laila Erica Drew) attended. When McCleskey said this onstage, a cheer erupted from a part of the audience, presumably Delta Sigma Theta sisters.
Suffs boldly presents the bitter infighting that characterized much of the American suffrage movement. It also gives voice to those who callously dismiss its achievements as limited and thus, to many, meaningless. Still, that cheer from Delta Sigma Theta filled me with hope.
