70 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022THE THEATRETHE RIGHTS STUFF
A new musical takes on Alice Paul ’s tireless fight for women’s suffrage.BYALEXANDRA SCHWARTZILLUSTRATION BY KATI SZILÁGYIH
ave you heard of the juggernaut
musical about the young, scrappy
American revolutionary with a surplus
of political genius, who’s determined to
change the course of history with the
help of a gang of committed cronies?
No, not “Hamilton”—I’m talking about
“Suffs,” an ambitious new show (directed
by Leigh Silverman, at the Public) that
sets out to do for the suffragist Alice
Paul what Lin-Manuel Miranda did for
Alexander H. The show’s thirty-three-
year-old creator, Shaina Taub, wrote the
music, the lyrics, and the book, and she
stars as Paul, who surely counts as one
of the twentieth century’s most remark-
able figures, if not—yet—one of its
household names. “Suffs,” which sold outits run well before opening, features a
strong female and non-binary cast, an
inspiring story, and songs that stick in
the head for days. Paul has already been
featured onscreen, in the 2004 film “Iron
Jawed Angels.” Soon she may find her-
self hoofing it on Broadway, a founding
mother to beat the band.
Paul was born, in New Jersey, in 1885.
Her family were Quaker, a faith that
champions sexual equality, and she was
able to obtain the kind of topnotch ed-
ucation that wasn’t readily available to
most women of her day. She studied
biology at Swarthmore and sociology at
the University of Pennsylvania, then
crossed the Atlantic to attend the Uni-
versity of Birmingham, where she en-countered the militant suffragist Chris-
tabel Pankhurst and was immediately
converted to the cause. From Christabel
and her famous mother, Emmeline, Paul
learned the principles of direct action
and civil disobedience. She marched, pro-
tested, and was repeatedly arrested; in
jail, she went on hunger strike, which re-
sulted in torture by force-feeding. Phys-
ically weakened but spiritually undaunted,
Paul returned to the United States, de-
termined to use her organizational ex-
pertise to win American women the vote.
That is where Taub picks up the story.
It’s 1913, and popular sentiment toward
the suffragist struggle is not exactly surg-
ing. On a stage dominated by the wide
steps and looming columns of the Cap-
itol (the set, designed by Mimi Lien, is
male power incarnate), the cast, equipped
with false mustaches, mug about in the
guise of incensed men. Tossing around
era-appropriate yuk-yuk jokes (“What
do a good woman and a good picture
show have in common?” “They’re both
silent!”), these petty gents ridicule what
they fear and despise, a strategy that
“Suffs,” armed with history’s hindsight
advantage, turns right back on them.
We first see Paul when she bursts
breathlessly into a meeting of the Na-
tional American Woman Suffrage As-
sociation, whose members are deter-
mined to conduct themselves with all
the dignity their detractors lack. The or-
ganization’s seasoned head, Carrie Chap-
man Catt ( Jenn Colella), is convinced
that only polite, ladylike persuasiveness
will carry the day. nawsa has helped
win women’s suffrage in Wyoming, Mon-
tana, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Oregon, Kan-
sas, Arizona, Washington, Colorado, and
California, a record that Catt recites with
pride, but Paul is unimpressed. Only
eleven states out of forty-eight? Catt’s
incremental approach is too cautious for
this fast-talking big thinker. Woodrow
Wilson is about to take office, and Paul
wants Catt to join her in demanding the
new President’s support for a constitu-
tional amendment that will grant suf-
frage throughout the land. She’s plan-
ning a protest march, the first of its kind,
for the day before the Inauguration: thou-
sands of women from all over the coun-
try parading down Pennsylvania Ave-
nue, dressed in white so that they’ll stand
out in newspaper photographs.
“Suffs” braids the tangled history of the American suffrage movement into drama. The gall of Paul! Catt, dismayed,