Joe Biden’s been very clear that the Supreme Court “made a mistake” by overturning Roe — and in last week’s State of the Union address he called the justices out, turning around the wording of the Dobbs decision to suggest that the Court had, to be mildly, messed around — and, come November, would find out.
Look, [in] its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court majority wrote the following — and with all due respect, Justices — “Women are not without electoral or political power.”
You’re about to realize just how much you were right about that.
Whatever the outcome in November, it’s certainly the right time for Suffs — Shaina Taub’s musical retelling of the (ongoing) story of the women’s suffrage movement — to reach a wider audience. It’s not just a reminder of what it took for women to remind America of their fundamental right to political power a century ago but about how present the fight is today.
And if you had any doubts about the show’s significance, just look at the very high-profile coproducers attached to the project: foremost among them are theater superfan (and former Democratic presidential candidate) Hillary Clinton and Nobel Peace Prize winner and activist Malala Yousafzai.
The show makes its way from its sold-out run at the Public Theater to Broadway this month (it opens April 18, with previews beginning March 26) at the Music Box Theater on West 45th Street.
This week, we look back on our conversation with playwright, lyricist, and composer Shaina Taub, who stars as Alice Paul; the director, Leigh Silverman; and Nikki James, who plays Ida B. Wells. Each week, we excerpt a piece from our archives for our free subscribers to enjoy. If you enjoy these posts and appreciate the labor that goes into them, we’d be honored if you’d join us as a paid subscriber.
ANAND: In recent years, there’s been an effort to tell different kinds of stories — stories that are intersectional and show different perspectives.
And while it’s worthy and correct, it’s artistically and narratively complicated. What was the challenge of wanting to tell an honest and intersectional story while remembering that this is still art? It can’t be tedious or too complicated, and at some point, a show like this requires a degree of narrative simplification.
LEIGH: There would be a lot of faster ways to make a show, for sure. It takes a lot of time.
We were walking right into a piece of history that is thorny, racist, complicated, where there were a lot of ways that we could have told the story that, frankly, would’ve been an easier way to go.
For example, we could have decided to wrap up the story in a pleasurable way. One of the beautiful moments in the show was that we spent the whole time fighting for this moment when the 19th Amendment gets passed. Then the moment is delivered, and there’s a brief celebration. But it really means that only white women win the right to vote. And the show denies us a celebration that the audience wants.
It’s followed up by a song called “I Wasn’t There,” where all of the characters stand on stage and essentially say, “The amendment passed in the middle of the night. Some man signed a paper behind a closed door. And all of the people that you met that you spent two hours with are here to tell you that we were not there. We were not given a chance to celebrate.”
That anticlimax is ballsy. That is a bold thing to do. To me, that is the guiding principle of the whole show. This is not a show about an optimistic American moment. This is a depiction of flawed, difficult people who worked relentlessly. That was the mandate of the show.
ANAND: Nikki, you brought up James Baldwin earlier. So much of Baldwin’s work is about facing history, however ugly, because there’s something better on the other side. The show you all have built is about that kind of honesty, but it lands at a time in this country of book bans, critical race theory backlash, and a movement against honestly facing history. There’s a project going on in the Baldwin tradition and a strong counter-reaction to it.
How do you reflect on the show landing in a moment when middle schoolers are having their textbooks banned because they’re honest about history, in some of the same honest ways that you all are daring?
NIKKI: We have to remember that the show that we’re making is not just going to be for the time we’re living in. There will be people who won’t be able to see it now. There are kids whose parents won’t let them and who will discover it in 10 years when they get to college or when they’re looking. That is a responsibility, too. We’re making something for the present that hopefully will stand the test of time.
ANAND: Shaina, there’s this sense of despair many young people feel about the world their elders have left for them, whether it’s climate change or inequality. Many wonder whether we live in an unchangeable society.
This show is about a constitutional amendment. Many people don’t think the American constitution will be amended ever again. What do you think are the specific lessons for young people in this show about how to create change when it feels impossible?
SHAINA: Many people in the development years of this would be like, “Isn’t it so depressing? Nothing’s changed. Is that the main takeaway?” I would say, “Yes, there’s so much more to do.”
The big takeaway for me is that they were in a far worse position. I would much rather be a woman in 2022 than in 1912. These women were able to do the impossible-seeming task of changing the U.S. Constitution one hundred years ago, before Twitter, the internet, and all of these platforms that we have to organize today. They did a Western campaign tour by train, automobile, and foot. They created the notion of women as a voting bloc before all of the tools we have today. That’s inspiring to me.
Another backbone of the show is the idea from the Talmud that you are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. I put it at the top of my script and in the program. A lot of these activist slogans like “Never again,” “Enough,” or “It ends today” lead us to think we can complete these fights in our lifetime. And yet, of course, that never happens.
How can we not let that defeat us? How can we understand that we’re not going to get to the last day? We’re not going to get to “Enough is enough” in our lifetime, but that doesn’t let us off the hook. We have to push it forward as much as we can. I hope that it galvanizes us to realize the victories.
That’s why this show, at the end, says, “Don’t forget our failure. Don’t forget our fight.” Don’t forget all of the ways that we messed up and of the ways these fights are not over. Don’t forget all the things we won. Look what we did. You can, too.
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
This post was originally published on The.Ink.