Shaina Taub’s new musical, Suffs, follows Hamilton and Take Me Out in the Public Theater’s tradition of pointing at intersectional conflict without investigating it.
Shaina Taub in SUFFS
Suffs tells the story of real-life Women’s Rights activist Alice Paul, played by Taub herself, as she fights for women’s suffrage toward the ratification of the 19th Amendment. The Women’s Suffrage Movement of the early 20th century has been famously whitewashed by history. Like any show premiering in the 2020s, Suffs attempts to rectify this by acknowledging it. However, you can’t avoid being a White Feminist story by simply acknowledging that you’re a White Feminist story. In order to paint a more diverse picture of the Suffragist Movement, Taub weaves in narratives of Black activists such as Ida B Wells (Nikki M James) and Marry Church Terrell (Cassondra James) with Paul’s story, and director Leigh Silverman casts a racially diverse group of women to tell it. Unfortunately, this “representation” brings awareness to the fact that the experiences of women of color are utilized as supplemental detail as opposed to integral parts of the story. This begs the question: how much does a perspective or experience need to be included to be considered “representation?”
Let’s dig a little deeper into how Suffs utilizes its narratives of color.
Nikki M James as Ida B Wells
Suffs’ Ida B. Wells is the posterchild for racial diversity in the Suffragist movement. Her entrance, 20 minutes (give or take) into the first act, is our introduction into the concept of intersectionality. After we’ve established Alice Paul as our unlikely hero, assembled her band of Merry [Wo]Men, and established Carrie Catt (Jenn Colella) as a rival, the audience finds Paul planning a march on Washington with her group. In comes the first mention of Wells: the mysterious legend who has announced her participation in said march. We are told about Wells’ notoriety, as understood by White women. Since we aren’t given the opportunity to see her feats for ourselves, our understanding of Wells value is controlled by White perspectives. Wells finally enters after Paul’s decision to create a segregated section of the march for the Black Suffragists at the back of the parade instead of with their own state delegations. The fact that this slight is the thing that summons Wells establishes Blackness as an entity that only exists in opposition. Why didn’t we hear from her until antagonized? Why wasn’t she referenced when Paul was developing her ideology or sought after for inspiration as she was discovering herself as a leader? After Wells arrives, Paul faces off against her and tells the more established woman that she must “wait her turn.” Wells retorts with a gorgeous ballad detailing the struggle of the duo-oppressive state of Black womanhood. The audience cheers and Wells exits to disappear into the blackground for the rest of the show only to reappear in small vignettes, almost never the focus again. Perhaps I’m biased because it was the best that Nikki M James has ever sounded, but she held the stage with such power that you could really feel her absence.
Nikki M James (left) and Cassondra James (right) as Ida B Wells and Mary Rose Terrell (respectively)
I’m not going to posit that Taub presented Black women as a monolith. Within the fracturing of the Suffragist movement, there was further fracturing between Black Activists. This conflict is illustrated in the friendship between Wells and Terrell. Foreshadowing arguments that Dr. King and Malcolm X would have decades later, the two abolitionist suffragists disagree on the right path to equality: working within or acting out. They also differ in their opinions of the validity of working with their White should-be colleagues. This argument mirrors the intergenerational conflict between Paul and Catt; however, unlike their white counterparts, neither Wells nor Terrell have the space to elucidate their ideologies or provide any examples of their practice. That space is reserved for Paul and the rest of her White peers.
Wells and Terrell are the only fleshed out characters that are historically non-White, so the fact that they are banished to the periphery tells me that even in a play that is trying to be purposefully inclusive, no one’s story is more important than the White woman’s.
Shaina Taub (left) and Jenn Colella (right) as Alice Paul and Carrie Catt
Taub and Silverman utilize the imagery of race differently throughout the show.
They introduce the audience to this device with the first song in which the entire ensemble of diverse women sing as White men lamenting about the perceived consequences of female liberation. This choice preps the audience to understand that everything might not be as it appears: a Black woman can play a historically White man. This choice also introduces a secondary device that the creative team utilizes: a double consciousness of ensemble in which the actor is commenting on the character that they’re embodying. For example, the ensemble asks “When women get the right to vote, who’s next?” Nikki M James replies, “Female Africans?” and Phillipa Soo replies “Ch*in*men?” This is another way that the production is drawing attention to the erasure of women of color from this issue. These choices had me excited to see how women of color were going to continuously subvert the White narratives of this story. Unfortunately, I was disappointed.
Phillipa Soo (left) and Shaina Taub (right) as Inez Milholla and Alice Paul (respecitvely)
Throughout the production, I was confused as to whether or not I was supposed to consistently be thinking about the race of the actors and how it conflicts with the characters they play or erase their racial identity and solely see them as their characters. Phillipa Soo portrays famous white suffragist Inez Milholland in Paul’s camp. Aside from a single moment (she hesitates to turn Wells away and looks ashamed when she inevitably does so), the audience is unaware of the significance of having an Asian American actress portray this wealthy White woman. Nadia Dandashi plays the group’s white secretary, Doris Stevens, and unlike Soo’s single moment of racial double consciousness, Dandashi’s racial identity is almost entirely erased by the story. The diverse women cast as Alice Paul’s contemporaries were ultimately whitewashed.
That device of double consciousness doesn’t disappear forever, however. Learning from the reaction to Black actors Daveed Diggs and Christopher Jackson playing slave owners, Silverman reserves the roles of oppressive White leadership to White actors. She, instead, pairs them with assistants of color (Jaygee Macapugay’s Mollie Hay assisting Colella’s Catt and Tsilala Brock’s Dudley Malone assisting Grace Mclean’s Woodrow Wilson.) Both assistants start off as completely loyal helpers, and throughout the show, become more and more aware of their leaders’ hypocrisy until finally, they call them out and attempt to shame them into making the “right” decision. What was an attempt to put the “right” words in minority mouths instead comes off as perpetuation of “magical negroes” whose ultimate theatrical purpose is to talk some sense into their white superiors.
Grace Mclean and Tsilala Brock as Woodrow Wilson and Dudley Malone (repsectively)
Ultimately, the most persistent use of racial identity in the musical is as ornamentation that ensemble members can don whenever convenient. There is a moment as Paul’s group grows and grows, a New Mexican delegate speaks. An ensemble member dons a scarf and begins to sing in Spanish to represent said delegate. This ensemble members whose race has not been acknowledged either explicitly or implicitly to this point, steps out of the raceless void to claim the identity that had been previously muted. There is not another mention of Hispanic identification in the musical. In the donning of these identities, the musical also conflates minority struggles together as the “Other” from the show’s focus, Whiteness. At Paul’s famous Suffrage Parade on Washington (the first march on Washington as the musical states,) a Chinese woman with a baby walks through the crowd. She sings about how the importance of showing her daughter the power of women and the media capturing photographic evidence of a Chinese woman’s involvement in the march outweighs her fear. Ida B Wells joins her in this musical line of defiance, which could be a heart wrenching moment of solidarity. Unfortunately, since this is the first narrative mention of an Asian American woman, her struggles become conflated with those of Wells who we understand better, barely. Suddenly, the very complex struggle of Asian American womanhood is looped in with Black womanhood as “Other.”
Rehearsals for SUFFS
This piece is not to admonish Taub or Silverman. Both women performed their tasks masterfully. Suffs is an incredibly well-written and directed musical, and we all know that Ms. Taub knows how to write a damn song. I think that the true antagonist here is the French neo classic’s unity of action that has persisted in most contemporary dramaturgies: a principle that instructs playwrights to center a single action involving a single protagonist. However, the technique, in this context, hierarchizes the narratives in the story and perpetuates the minimizing of women of color that the show is trying to amend. Is it possible to write a story about a historically whitewashed period without centering Whiteness? If Alice Paul was continuously pushing Women of Color to the side, how can a show about Alice Paul not do the same? Towards the end of Suffs, the female ensemble laments the fact that when the 19th Amendment was eventually signed, it was done so by a man alone in a room. Each ensemble member says the name of a female activist who “wasn’t there” to witness the historic moment. This list is a lot more diverse than the named cast of this musical. It was these names that needed to be given the spotlight alongside Alice Paul as opposed to behind her. There’s just too much content necessary to fully diversify this narrative AND fit into the story of a single person. Even in this article, I didn’t focus on how the show dumbed down the concept of socialism, and how the suffrage movement took advantage of migrant workers: an argument introduced by Ruza Wenclawska (Hannah Cruz) and quickly forgotten by the rest of the cast. What if Suffs decentered Alice Paul and instead presented a story about several different suffragists and treat them all as main characters? That way, when the show presents all the different women that weren’t included in the signing, the audience actually understands why they should’ve been. The diversifying of this narrative can’t just be in the content; it must be in the form as well, for the classical theatre structure is inherently White. Once we free ourselves from the shackles of Aristotelian structure, we can begin to explore the multitude of perspectives that make up any event: perspectives that are inspired by very specific experiences associated with different identities existing simultaneously.) I know. It’s a mouth full, but that’s the world we live in.
The cast of SUFFS
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