Thinking About Current Women’s Struggles

Phillipa Soo says she noticed a change in the audience immediately.

News had just dropped of the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, and there was a different vibe coming from the audience at “Suffs,” in which the former “Hamilton” star plays an early 20th-century suffragist. Some audience members at the Public Theater seemed to be clearly feeling a link, she says, between two struggles 100 years apart— ever a woman’s vote, and over women’s reproductive rights.

“There’s a difference in how people were hearing this play,” says Soo, who plays real-life labor lawyer and activist Inez Milholland in the musical. She describes “audience members literally reaching their hands up in solidarity with what we’re saying—in the same week that all of this stuff was happening in the news surrounding abortion and bodily autonomy.”

“Suffs” creator and star Shaina Taub had the same feeling that Tuesday in early May. That afternoon,

Taub had led many of her cast members in song— “How Long,” a cry for liberty —at a lower Manhattan rally reacting to the Supreme Court leak. Taub told the crowd how the scene, with protesters and their giant banners, looked strikingly like a suffrage rally a century earlier. “I wanted to write a play that was there for us on days like that,” Ms. Taub says.

Taub stars as Alice Paul, a fiercely determined leader who not only waged hunger strikes and endured brutal forced feedings in jail to achieve suffrage, but immediately afterward started work on a proposed constitutional amendment guaranteeing women equal rights under the law—what’s now called the Equal Rights Amendment (and still isn’t law).

It was perhaps inevitable that the show, birthed on the same off-Broadway stage as the juggernaut “Hamilton,” would become known as sort of a female version — a “Hermilton,” as some dubbed it.

“Quite frankly, I’m thrilled,” Soo says of the comparison, “because it’s another example of how art can get people excited about history, about being a citizen, about being involved in democracy.”

But the task was different. “Hamilton,” about the nation’s founding fathers, “took a story that we knew or thought we knew, and flipped it,” director Silverman says. “(With) our show there was nothing to flip because nobody knows anything. And so we had a very different kind of responsibility—and also challenge.”

Jenn Colella, a Tony nominee, plays Carrie Chapman Catt. She, too, says she came into the show “a complete blank slate.”

Tears were also Colella’s response when she first heard her costar, Nikki M. James, sing the powerful “Wait My Turn” as Ida B. Wells, the Black journalist and activist who fought for racial and gender justice. The song, an emotional highpoint of the show, is a biting response to how Black suffragists were sidelined by their white counterparts. Ms. Colella calls it “that moment where every piece of your flesh stands on end and you know something important is happening.”

James, a Tony winner for “The Book of Mormon,” notes that despite the density of the play, it still can only touch on five or six main characters: “There’s hundreds more where they came from.”

James recalls how throughout its development, “Suffs” was impacted by events in the outside world. The protests over George Floyd’s murder by police prompted Taub to add more of a racial dimension. And when the Supreme Court draft leaked that would overturn Roe, which guarantees abortion rights nationwide, James says it felt like some of Taub’s lyrics had been written for that very moment. That night, she says, “I walked on stage and I had an inability to be an actor. I felt tears streaming down my face, because the work is never over.”

As the run draws to a close, the cast of about 20 — and comprised solely of female and non-binary actors — has been enjoying the interplay with audience members who approach them after the show saying they want to learn more.