On Broadway’s “Suffs”

So… I had a really terrific summer.  Not to brag, but it was particularly amazing.  There were several things which made it so, but one stand-out moment was (finally!) going back to my forever-heart-home of New York City (after not visiting since Covid-19 upended my annual pilgrimage) and getting to see GOOD live theatre once again.

Like the theatre addict/nerd I am, I used my time wisely and saw 4 shows in 24 hours.  Yes.  You read that correctly.  FOUR SHOWS in 24 hours.  Thankfully, I was able to swing a 3pm, a 5pm, and an 8pm show on Saturday, followed by another 3pm on Sunday.  It was like going to church or temple or a shrine for me.  A kind of spiritual re-awakening.

I want to focus on ONE of the four TRULY FANTASTIC shows I saw (they were all spectacular) because, as a feminist killjoy, I think it needs discussing.

And that show, was Suffs.

Spoilers ahead, so stop here if you’re waiting for the National Tour (whenever that might be)!

Okay, if I’m being totally honest, I was really nervous to see this show for several reasons.

Reason number one?  I had seen Illinoise earlier that day and it was beautiful, and breathtaking, and awe-inspiring, and the images and moments on stage from that show will stay with me long after I left the theatre.  

Then I saw Oh, Mary, which was literally painful.  Painful, in that I laughed SO HARD during that show that my face actually hurt when I left the theatre.  Seriously, I had to massage my jaw on my way out.  It was the funniest fucking thing I have ever seen on Broadway, and I was shocked that something so gay, so irreverent, so (almost) sacrilegious, SO SUBVERSIVE ever made it to a Broadway stage. 

I was actually feeling proud of Broadway audiences for embracing something so very “downtown” all the way up on 45th and Broadway.

Basically, I’m a snob and I didn’t want to ruin my A+ perfect day at the theatre.

Second, (and MUCH more importantly) I have never (as stated above) held Broadway audiences in very high esteem.  Sure, there are real New Yorkers who see shows, but most of what I saw when I lived in the city were the downtown shows not Broadway musicals.  I saw shows at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), and The Public, and Second Stage, and Playwrights Horizons, and Cherry Lane, and Classic Stage...  I’d see something on Broadway if I could get a cheap lottery ticket of if a friend who worked in the theatre had free tickets to give away, but much of what existed on Broadway was (and is even more so now) targeted toward tourists who can drop $300 on a theatre ticket and want to be “entertained.”  They don’t want to be challenged or to think all that much.  And that’s fine for them—no judgement… but it isn’t my jam.

So… Suffs is about the women’s suffrage movement and was produced (in part) by Hillary Clinton… neo-liberal to the core.  I was worried that I had paid a pretty penny to see White Feminism[1] on Broadway and I had no interest in that. 

I was worried that it would be like the Barbie movie.  I enjoyed it, sure, but it was like White Women’s Gender Studies 101.  I’m glad that a few more people know what the patriarchy is now, and America Ferrara’s speech was ON POINT.  But it wasn’t exactly ground-breaking for me.

So yeah, very low expectations.

The show began with the laugh line “Welcome, Gentleman” and I’ll admit, I did laugh at that… and then I looked at WHO was on stage… ALL WHITE WOMEN.  Yes, there was one wheelchair user on stage, BUT they were ALL white.

I rolled my eyes and prepared to be angry for the next two+ hours.

The initial conflict in the show is made clear in the first twenty minutes: it’s 1913 and Alice Paul (Shaina Taub, who also wrote the book, music, and lyrics) wants to push Carrie Chapman Catt (Jenn Colella), the leader of National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), to organize a massive march on Washington on the day of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, pressuring him to support women’s suffrage.  It’s a tale as old as time: the young people are radical and want change NOW, and the older generation (who has been working for decades on the issue) advises prudence, patience, and restraint.

So, Alice Paul (Taub) goes rogue and recruits some other young upstart activists to her cause (college friend, Lucy Burns played by Ally Bonino; Ruza Wenclawska, a Polish labor rights activist, played by Kim Blanck; college student, Doris Stevens, played by Nadia Dandashi; and wealthy socialite, Inez Milholland, played by the jaw-droppingly talented, Hannah Cruz in her Broadway debut).  They too were all white (as they were in real life because the history of the feminist movement is deeply rooted in white supremacy and racism).  Again, my eyes rolled.

And so, the privileged white women plan their fight for freedom.

BUT THEN…

Nikki M. James as Ida B. Wells comes on stage and gives ‘em hell.  After learning that in order to appease the Southern delegations to the march, Paul (Taub) and her team have created a separate (and certainly not equal) “colored” delegation at the back of the march, Wells lays down the law.  She demands that she will march with her state delegation or that she (and the other Black women she represents) will not march at all and harshly and directly criticizes the white women for sacrificing Black women’s rights in order to promote their own.  She sings, “Wait my Turn” and tells them,

Wait my turn, when will you white women ever learn?
I had the same old talk with Carrie Chapman Catt 20 years ago.
I thought you might be better, but you still don't know.
You want me to wait my turn, to simply put my sex before my race.
Oh, why don't I leave my skin at home and powder up my face?

Guess who always waits her turn, who always ends up in the back?
Us lucky ones born both female and black.
Wait my turn, while I sure don't see you waiting yours.
No, you're preaching, "We demand it now"
While knocking down locked doors.
But you want me to wait my turn, so you don't offend your southern base.
Since when does a radical roll over for bigots in the first place?

That's not leadership, Alice, it's cowardice.

After I picked my jaw up off of the floor, I thought to myself… “Okay… maybe this isn’t going to be White Feminism after all…!”  I was still reticent, however—one song does not intersectional feminism make.

But then… more suffragists of color had something to say.  Mary Church Terrell (Anastacia McCleskey) and her daughter, Phyllis (D’Kaylah Unique Whitley), come to join the rally and have an earnest debate with Wells (James) about the approach of “dignified agitation” versus radical action.

Then Terrell and Phyllis sing, “Terrell’s Theme” and it was fantastic.

PHYLLIS:

Mama, they don't even want us here. Can we go?

MARY:

Child, since when do we do what they want us to?
It's like I always say, when we show up,
We show up for all of us.
And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go.
Say it.

PHYLLIS:

And so, lifting as we climb,
onward and upward we go.
Come on, let's march. Let's.

TOGETHER:

And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go.

Okay… maybe this is intersectional.

Maybe I actually really like this musical!!!

And THEN we see the march, with Inez Milholland (Cruz) riding a white horse into battle like some kind of Greek Goddess.  (I’m always here for strong, beautiful woman riding horses… see my post on Thor: Love & Thunder and Tessa Thompson).

After the march the women celebrate, but Doris Stevens (Dandashi) is upset.  Someone called her a…. bitch.

Cue what will probably be the most popular song in this show: “Great American Bitch” or “G.A.B” in the program.

The song is fantastic.  It is joyful.  It is more than joyful.  It is Killjoy Joyful.

The women sing about all the ways that they’re “bitches.”  Because they refuse to “know their place” and kick men who try to assault them.  They’re “bitches” because they earn their own money, sleep with whomever they want to, stand up for themselves against misogynists, and refuse to apologize for any of it. (To be perfectly honest, I was super tempted to buy the “Great American Bitch” t-shirt in the lobby… but I probably couldn’t wear it to work so… I didn’t).

The audience laughed throughout the song and when it was over the applause was deafening.  In “The Killjoy Manifesto” which closes Sara Ahmed’s 2017 (mandatory reading) Living A Feminist Life, she tell us that “[t]here can be joy in finding killjoys; there can be joy in killing joy. Our eyes meet when we tell each other about rolling eyes” (268).​

In that moment, in that song, it felt like the entire audience (or at least all the women in it) were collectively rolling our eyes at one another in the knowledge that at some point or other in all our lives each and every one of us has probably been called a “bitch.”

And yes, I too, am a Great American Bitch. 

And it gave me Killjoy Joy to sing about it.

Then Woodrow Wilson (Grace McClean) tries to “appease” the women, telling them in “Ladies” how much he understands them because, “[a]s the father of three daughters, as the husband to a wife, I don’t know who I’d be without the ladies in my life.”  Explaining that we must “take care of the ladies” because their lives will be “polluted” by politics, and thus need to be “protected.”

Sure, this takes place in 1913, but we’ve all heard the “father of daughters” bullshit from those on the right (anyone remember Coach Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings?). And this moment sung (haha) given that there are actual real live people in the Republican party who have stated very clearly that they are against women voting.  A current candidate for the US House in the state of Michigan, John Gibbs, founded a “think-tank” which he called the “Society for the Critique of Feminism” in the early-2000s which advocated for repealing the 19th Amendment(!). He argued that women voting has led to a “totalitarian state” and that women do not possess the “characteristics necessary to govern” because apparently women have too many eewey goowy feelings and men are more logical (don’t you just love how the patriarchy has re-branded anger as “not an emotion?”).

Multiple basement-dwelling (I’m making assumptions here) men in the man-o-sphere have argued that women should never have gotten suffrage.

But I digress…

As the women move into the convention we again hear from Wells (James), Terrell (McCleskey), and others debating over how Black women will be used in this moment and in the movement.  Will they be trotted out as props or actually given a platform to speak about the unique position of Black women in the movement?

The argument echoed bell hooks’ work in Feminist Theory from Margin to Center, where she argues that white women behave as if Black women do not know that sexism and women’s oppression exists until white feminists teach them about it, even though Black women experience patriarchy and oppression even more acutely than the vast majority of white women​. She notes that Black women exist for white women as “objects of study” who need to be “saved” by white women.

hooks argues in this text (and did until the day she died) that Black women have a “special vantage point” that offers them a unique and specific “perspective to criticize the dominant, racist, classist, sexist hegemony” and that they have a “central role to play in the making of feminist theory” because “the formation of a liberatory feminist theory and praxis is a collective responsibility, one that must be shared” (18)​.

While this musical was made primarily by white women, it engages with that fact in the musical itself.  It is self-aware both of the white supremacist history of the feminist movement and (I think) of its own limitations in terms of representations.

The first act ends with “The Campaign” and “How Long?”

In the former we learn that Millholland (Cruz) is ill (and has been for several years) and yet is giving everything (literally) she has to the movement.  Cruz belts out the question: “how long?” and collapses.  This moment hit me… these women were all real.  Inez Milholland actually died fighting for something that we, today, take so deeply for granted.

As the curtain falls for the end of Act One, the image of the real Milholland on her white horse is suspended from floor to ceiling. 

That was the first time I cried.

The fight continues in Act Two.  The women come together as “Silent Sentinels” to protest at The Capitol and refuse to leave.  Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, Doris Stevens, and Ruza Wenclawska are arrested and thrown in jail. 

As the white women fight to free Alice Paul and others, Ida B. Wells (James) and Mary Church Terrell (McCleskey) reprise “Wait My Turn.”  They ask:

How many more thrown in nameless graves?
How many more falsely charged with crime?
How many more whipped and shot like slaves?
How many more murdered in their prime?
How many more pamphlets must I write?

How many more threats must I withstand?
How many more lynchings must I cite?
How many more times must I demand?
How many more years off of my life?
How many, till I'm a grieving wife?
How long, till it's too late?

I was relieved to see that the musical wasn’t going to erase the Black women and their fight in favor of only focusing on the white women’s struggle.

Meanwhile, we see Paul and the others’ hunger strike.  We see them bring force-fed.  We see them refusing to yield.  We see them being diagnosed with “hysteria.”  This history was not news to me.  I’ve read this feminist history and saw the scene-chewing performance of Hilary Swank in the 2004 film, Iron Jawed Angels.  What was surprising to me was the fact the everyone I was there with was unaware that any of this ever happened.  When I got to talking to more people and asking if they knew this history… they didn’t.

When we finally see the last state (Tennessee) voting on ratification of the 19th Amendment, the jubilation was palpable.  On stage and in the audience.  There was an eruption of whooping and clapping and cheering.

Why don’t we learn this history?

The history of Paul, and Millholland, and Wells, and Terrell? 

I think we all know the answer to this question.  The Great Man Theory of history argues that in order to understand history, we must follow the “Great Men” who made it.  If we follow these figures, we will understand how the world as we know it and the history of that world came to be.  And in some ways, this is accurate. 

If we look at the “Great Men” of history, we’ll understand how women, indigenous people, poor people, Black and Brown people, queer people, disabled people, and more were written out of history. 

If we only look at the Great Men, the rest of us simply don’t exist.

This musical is an effort at recuperating parts of that lost history.  It is still mostly white and straight (though there was a moment in the end where Carrie Chappman Catt (Jenn Colella) and her partner, Mollie Hay (Jaygee Macapugay) sing a reprise of an earlier song, “If We Were Married” where the audience learns that our uptight, dusty, rigid, “Welcome, Gentleman,” restrained suffragist was actually gay) BUT it is giving audiences a chance to see a history that has been stolen from us.

The musical sign-posts moments in history by stepping out of the action and offering specific dates and events, and unlike Hamilton (arguably another “history musical,”) it doesn’t pull nearly as many punches.

Speaking of Hamilton…

The musical was wildly successful (and frankly, I really do love the music), but it “brown-washes” the history of enslaved people by using Black and brown bodies to tell their stories.  We LOVE Thomas Jefferson because we LOVE Daveed Diggs.  But if there was a time machine to go back to the 1700s Jefferson would have owned Diggs.  Friend and scholar, Donatella Gallela, in her 2018 article, “Being In ‘The Room Where It Happens’: Hamilton, Obama, and Nationalist Neoliberal Multicultural Inclusion” argues that the musical offers a kind of neoliberal and multicultural utopia (recall, a place that doesn’t exist) in which the American “meritocracy” is celebrated; racism, sexism, and the horrors of slavery are minimized; and the status quo is firmly upheld, rather than challenged.

Suffs offers more of a direct challenge to that status quo. 

While Hamilton has the final song, "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?" which extols the telling of the stories of old, dead, white, men (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, etc.).  It notes that Hamilton’s story wasn’t told (other than appearing on the $10 bill since 1929, having more than a dozen biographies written about him, and…you know… this musical):

ANGELICA:
Every other founding father story gets told
Every other founding father gets to grow old

BURR:
But when you’re gone, who remembers your name?
Who keeps your flame?

So, who does tell Hamilton’s story?  It’s his wife, Eliza.  The wife he cheated on.  The wife he publicly humiliates. The wife who he leaves alone when he dies in a stupid duel which boils down to a pissing contest between two men bathing in toxic masculinity.  The women tell the story.  They don’t enact the story.  They don’t move the story forward.  They don’t make the story happen.  They react to it.  They suffer because of it.  They tell it.  But the men make the (his)story.

Suffs takes a different approach.  It’s not about the people who are dead… it’s about those who come after.

Once the 19th Amendment is passed and the celebration has subsided Wells (James) and Church Tyrell (McCleskey) can’t celebrate like the white women do.  In “I Was Here” they sing:  

WELLS:
I bet all the white ladies were crying rivers, huh? 

PHYLLIS:

Oh, they sure were.
But me and Mama, we danced our way right out of the state house, didn't we?

WELLS:

Your mama dancing?
Now I would like to see that.

MARY:
I like to dance, okay?

Then there’s a pause, and the music slows, and Wells (James) almost whispers,

They'll still stop our women from voting,
Same as they do to our men.

Mary (McCleskey) takes a deep breath and responds, “I know, but I'm so tired of fighting.”

It’s a heart-breaking and honest moment.  We cannot celebrate fully.  We cannot congratulate ourselves fully and pat ourselves on the back.  Our work is not done.  As Audre Lorde says in her 1981 book, Sister Outsider, “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained.”  Amen.

But then Phyllis (Whitley) sings:

And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go. Say it, Mama.

MARY:

And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go.

IDA, MARY, PHYLLIS:
And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go.

This is the message of the musical.  It’s a recouperation of a history that is seldom told, but it is also a call to keep reaching back to the next generation of women.  We lift them up, as we climb towards an end to the white supremacist, capitalist, hetero-patriarchy.  It’s not about us. It’s about who we lift up.

As the song concludes the ensemble comes together and sings:

I want my mother to know I was here.
I want my sisters to know I was here.
I want my great-granddaughter to know I was here. I was here.
I want your mother to know I was here.
I want your children to know I was here.
I want your great-granddaughter to know. I need her to know I was here.

And I fucking balled.  

I want to remember all the women on whose shoulders I stand.  I went to college, to graduate school, got a PhD. I can drive a car, have a checking account, own a home, make my own money.  And the only reason I can do these things is because of the women who came before me, who fought and died and never gave up.

And as I look at my daughter and think that she is less free than I was at her age, less free than her grandmothers and great grandmothers were for most of their lives, I want to fight, and I want her to know that I did.

Lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go.

And also… PLEASE VOTE.

Because for much of our history we couldn’t, because some people don’t want you to, and because of all the women who suffered and died fighting for our ability to do so.

[1] White Feminism is feminism which is NOT intersectional.  It is feminism BY privileged white women, FOR privileged white women, where poor women, queer, women, and BIPOC women are props (at best).  Feminism without intersectionality is WHITE SUPREMACY and don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise!