The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
Singing about suffrage, and thinking about current struggles
NEW YORK » 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 — over 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
“I think the show should live on and give as many people as possible the opportunity to see it,” says director Leigh Silverman, asked if there were hopes of a Broadway transfer. “That’s my hope for it.”
In interviews, the cast and creatives of “Suffs,” which covers the final years leading to passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, recalled an emotional visit from Gloria Steinem, two nights after the feminist icon’s 88th birthday (the cast serenaded her). And another emotional one from Hillary Clinton, who had pointedly worn the suffragists’ color of white to accept the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. (She also wore it to the inauguration of her rival, Donald Trump.)
“My only regret is she wasn’t there in her capacity as president,” Taub says of the woman who would have cracked the ultimate glass ceiling. But she adds: “At the end of the show we sing “Don’t forget our failure. Don’t forget our fight.’ Who will make it?... The next one will.”
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).
But Taub, like most people, had never learned in school about Paul and her cohorts. In college at New York University, Taub studied earlier social movements but not the women who changed history in the early 20th century. When she read “Jailed for Freedom” by suffragist Doris Stevens, Taub thought: “These women could be a musical.” She dove down a research rabbit hole for several years, “poring over footnotes and bibliographies… searching for breadcrumbs.”