Touring ‘Suffs,’ soon at PPAC, animates the 19th Amendment with a Jewish sensibility

PROVIDENCE – For most of us, the U.S. Suffrage Movement that kicked off in 1848 and culminated in the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote was glossed over or flat-out ignored in our early education.

I first learned about suffragettes by watching Glynis Johns’s mild-mannered portrayal of Mrs. Winifred Banks, who was always leaving her family in the hands of a nanny so she could attend a meeting or a march in the 1964 Disney classic “Mary Poppins.”

New York’s The Public Theater, infamous for offering groundbreaking and controversial perspectives of the American experience – including our founding (“Hamilton”), our families (“Fun Home”) and our fortitude (“Caroline, or Change”) – sought to

set the record straight on suffrage. The result was its 2022 off-Broadway premiere of “Suffs,” which would go on to become a 2024 Tony Award-winning musical. Its inaugural national tour will be arriving in Providence later this month.

The ambitious, sung-through musical was written and composed by then-25-year-old Shaina Taub, with whom my daughter A.J. attended Stagedoor Manor – the world-renowned theater camp in New York's Catskills Mountains – when they were teens. Taub recently returned there to workshop a pilot youth production of “Suffs.” But I digress. 

The show opens with the song “Let Mother Vote,” led by Carrie Chapman Catt (Marya Grandy), an old school suffragist who favors a ladylike way of asking men for women’s rights. Enter Alice Paul (Maya Keleher), a young and unrelenting firebrand appalled that in the 60-plus years since Susan B. Anthony began the movement, women have still not claimed a victory. After attempting to work within Catt’s National American Woman Suffrage Association, Paul forms a splinter group and organizes a march in Washington, DC in 1913.

During the seven-year homestretch to ratification, Paul enlists a group of like-minded progressive women that include college pal Lucy Burns (Gwynne Wood); young devotee Doris Stevens (Livvy Marcus), a shy yet undeterred student from Nebraska; Polish-born labor organizer Ruza Wenclawska (Joyce MeiMei Zheng); and savvy socialite and lawyer Inez Milholland (Monica Tulia Ramirez). Black activists Ida B. Wells (Danyel Fulton) and Mary Church Terrell (Trisha Jeffrey) also join the fray.

Everyone gets a musical moment, as do unsung heroes like Phoebe Burn (Laura Stracko, singing “A Letter from Harry’s Mother”), the mother of the Tennessee state senator whose vote decided the fate of the amendment.

All this is presented with theatrical flair, an omnipresent educational imperative that adds weight to the undertaking and a wonderful and award-winning musicality that is at once witty, impassioned and empowering. This play brings an entertaining element to the story, noted the New York critics, without diminishing the seriousness of the subject or skipping over the darker aspects of the movement – the physical attacks, the imprisonment and the threats of psychiatric institutionalization.

While Taub takes some poetic license with the characters (both the male and female parts are played and sung by an all-female cast), she largely sticks to the historical record.

And because the playwright/composer/lyricist (Taub), director (Leigh Silverman), and

co-producers (Rachel Sussman and Jill Furman) are Jewish women, the musical’s message about the power of faith and sisterhood – something curiously missing from “Mary Poppins” – is neither subtle nor ambivalent. In fact, says Furman in an email exchange, it drives the musical “and serves as its central thesis and guiding principle.”

Judaism is not explicitly depicted or discussed on stage, largely because Alice Paul was an American Quaker. But in Taub’s 2024 Tony Award acceptance speech for best original score, she quoted a portion of the Talmud that she said serves as the show's Northern Star and foundational philosophy: “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

The quote, which appears just after the title page of the musical’s script, is attributed to Rabbi Tarfon and found in the canonical text of Jewish ethics, Pirkei Avot. It is part of the Mishna, the code of oral law that is at the core of the Talmud. The saying, according to The Jerusalem Post, has “animated legions of Jewish activists.” Add Taub to the list.

In an earlier interview with Hey Alma (a feminist Jewish culture site and online community), Taub noted: “So much of the language of activism is about this finality of finishing a struggle — never again, enough is enough, if not now, then when. But the fights and the struggles for equality and justice are never finished, and no generation really completes that work. It doesn’t mean you don’t still have to work and fight and organize as if you could finish it. It’s holding that contradiction in your head as an activist, and as any person working towards a better future.”

Taub seems to believe that the audience for her musical consists of people working toward a better future. If some of us are not quite those people going into the PPAC performance, it is highly likely that we will be coming out.

Bob Abelman is an award-winning theater critic who also writes for The Boston Globe. Connect with him on Facebook.