Interview: Marya Grandy of SUFFS at CIBC Theater

Suffragists are marching on to Chicago! The national tour of Suffs will be playing at the CIBC Theatre from July 7-19, telling the story of Alice Paul, Doris Stevens, Inez Milholland, Carrie Chapman Catt, Ida B. Wells, and the Suffragists who fought tirelessly for the 19th Amendment. 

Before it arrives in Chicago, BroadwayWorld talked with Marya Grandy, who plays Carrie Chapman Catt. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

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Welcome back to Chicago, and this time with the First National Broadway Tour of Suffs! You split your time between NYC and Chicago. What is it about the Second City and its theater scene that calls to you, and what does it mean to perform Suffs here? 

What I love about the Chicago theater scene is that it's the ultimate team sport. It is not an accident that improvisational theater was born in Chicago, and I feel like Chicago theater proves that time and time again. The fact that you could go see any number of shows over the course of a season and go from show to show and play a completely different role in every single production. They could be in the ensemble for one, they could be an offstage understudy for one, they could be the lead in the next one. And I think that is a recipe for a really well-wounded performer, and it also keeps you grounded. It keeps you very much in service of the show that you're doing, as opposed to thinking about, well, what exactly is my role in this show? And then thinking about the show second. 

So to bring Suffs — which has principle roles in it, but it really is an ensemble show — to Chicago, where the team player nature is so embraced here, to say nothing of the historical element of it, particularly with Ida B. Wells being such a pivotal character in our show, and given what a hero she is in Chicago…I can't overstress how excited I am to bring this show to Chicago.

And we’re so excited to have you! You were an American Studies major in college while you pursued arts and music. How has your background in American history, politics, and culture informed your approach to this role — a role that seems to be the perfect fusion of your interests? 

Yes, I was an American Studies major in college, which makes it quite humbling how little I knew about the suffrage movement when suffrage continues to be a very under-researched and underreported part of our nation's history — which feels inconceivable, given that we're about to celebrate the 250th birthday of America. Women, female-identifying people, make up over half of the population of this country, and it took 117 years for all women to get the right to vote and to be represented, which feels a little backwards to me. But that's where I am able to put my history hat on and look at it from the standpoint of, yes, that feels a little biased or patently unfair, both of which are true. And also, America is still such a young country compared to England, for example, the country that we liberated ourselves from. So a lot of the things that are happening and have happened in our nation's history so far in the macro are not as big of a deal. To be able to look back through history that way to see what else was happening in the country at the time — suffrage started while slavery was very much an ongoing concern. It was important for me to come at it from the angle of: Carrie only knows what she knows. She is trying to survive this water that she's swimming in. Of course she wants a better life for everybody, but at the time, so many people were enslaved that the idea of them being considered citizens to any great degree was a foreign concept, or one that she dare not think about because she could really get in trouble. So, that's where my interest in history and the cultural aspect of it comes into play.

You’ve mostly been a character actress in your career. When you’re playing a historical figure like Carrie Chapman Catt, what kind of source materials do you consult for background to prepare, and how have you added your own interpretation and personality to her character? 

I’m lucky that Carrie predated the moving image. There are no audio recordings and there isn't really film footage that's available to me of her, so I had to do research with regards to her writing. There's an incredible book called The Woman's Hour that focuses on the final days leading up to the vote in the Tennessee Statehouse. Carrie is one of the people who's profiled in this book, so I got a lot of my information from them, a lot of information from Doris Stevens book, Jailed for Freedom, a lot of articles in which she's basically being written off as an agitator. 

What’s cool about doing a musical adaptation is that you are allowed a certain amount of leeway because in normal everyday circumstances when you get frustrated, you don't normally burst into song, whereas we do in the world of Suffs. It’s sort of ironically fortunate because not a lot of people know who Carrie Chapman Catt was. They don't have a preconceived notion of her so she can be open to interpretation because she is a relative unknown within the cultural zeitgeist. We wanted to make sure that Leigh Silverman, our director, Shaina Taub, our writer, and I were all on the same page with how I was interpreting her. We all were very much in lockstep with one another about how she is at the beginning of the show, and how she transforms over the course of the show, and then where she is at the end of the show. That continues to evolve as we enter our almost 11th month of being on the road with this. I feel like I bring my own experiences as a female-identifying person, as a person in middle age, as an actor. I'm able to bring all of that to Carrie and then still hold space for her achievements.

Suffs follows the Women's Suffrage Movement leading up to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Today, more than a century later, we're still seeing attempts to block access to the ballot box. How does it feel to perform a Suffragist in this show in 2026 and to tell a story about this significant leap in progress for women's rights and voting rights, while seeing these current attacks on our rights continue to play out?

It’s very humbling because these women went through unbelievable adversity. Many of them were imprisoned under false pretenses, many of them were tortured, some of them died in prison, some women were disappeared. That is still something that is happening now in our country in different kinds of forms, not necessarily with regards to fighting for the vote, but with making their voices heard or peaceful protesting and how that can often result in violence. There has never been a more prescient time to be doing this show. It feels like the Venn diagram of my life as an artist and my life of trying to be of service has come together with doing this show because it's serving to educate people, it's serving to motivate people hopefully, and it’s serving to entertain at the same time. Theater is one of the few art forms that demands your attention. You don't have a remote. If you miss it, you miss it. You can't be on your phone. And it's been so rewarding to have audiences uniformly across the country be completely taken away by this show.

You just performed this show in Washington, D.C., and as you mentioned earlier, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is this year. SUFFS is a patriotic show, but in that, it also beautifully and painfully illustrates some of the tensions within the Suffragists movement when it came to Black women’s voting rights and how racial justice cannot be separated from gender equality. What does being an American mean to you in light of this complicated and unjust history in our country? 

I feel so fortunate to live here, and I also see how much work there is to be done. It can feel overwhelming and like there's no way I could make any kind of impact as just me. What Suffs does is drive home the message that there is no action that is too small that won't make an impact. It doesn't have to be political — it can be something as small as volunteering at your local food bank, going to the library and reading to kids, helping out at a senior center, organizing a car wash. Something that gets us out of ourselves for a little bit, so that we can be in service of something that encourages time together and being in community with one another because Suffs is the story of a movement. It's not the story of a person. It's the story of how groups of people came together over a century to push the needle forward. 

The finale to the show is a song called “Keep Marching” and it starts with the line, “I won't live to see the future that I fight for. Maybe no one gets to reach that perfect day. If the work is never over, then how do you keep marching anyway?” And that’s it. We're doing this not so that things are better for us, but so that what we leave behind is better. It gives the people that we leave behind and the people who come up after us a better chance of success and taking the tiny wins where you can.

Speaking of where you've been so far on tour — before I moved to Chicago, I was in Dayton, Ohio, and I volunteered with Dayton Live, where Suffs was part of the 2025-2026 Broadway in Dayton season. One of my fellow volunteers there originally marched for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1978, and she brought her original sash and got to share her experience with members of your company when the tour was there in April. What is it like to go to cities and meet people with lived experiences and connections to the stories you’re telling onstage, whether that’s people who marched for the ERA or community activist groups registering voters or school groups who are shaping the next generation of voters?  

I think it speaks to the power of live theater! The fact that you just named three completely different communities of people, and the thing that tied them together was a musical is amazing. That's really amazing to me. And that it's a musical that is cast with fully feminine, non-binary people telling this story about this enormous part of American history that is still unknown to so many people, and that it is wrapped up in this package of beautiful songs and really funny dialogue and complicated relationships on stage and people that you don't always sympathize with all the time. 

As women and as female-identifying people, we are very much often put in the position of having to be likable all the time. As we've been in process for this, I think so much about America Ferrera’s unbelievable monologue in Barbie. She's talking about having to be all of these things and having to be grateful, and having to be thin, but don't be too thin and be masculine, but don't be too mad. It is to be likable all the time, which is just not possible, but it has been demanded of us from the moment we were born. This show strongly embraces that idea. You don't have to like everybody on stage all the time — in fact, that's what makes the show that much more special because more people can relate to that. We've all fallen short of being likable because we're human. And Suffs is a profoundly human show. The ensemble nature and ultimate hopeful message of it reminds me a lot of how I felt after I saw Come From Away, that sense of adversity and there are days where it's just really, really hard to be a human being and to be a loving, kind, compassionate human being. 

Unfortunately, the alternative is unthinkable. If we are to survive, we need each other. We're in Washington, D.C., and there's all of this bunting for the celebration of the 250th. That's juxtaposed to all this construction going on at the White House, and it feels diametrically opposed. But you also have so many different kinds of people walking around D.C., people from across the globe, people from down the street, and they are all interacting with each other. They're all coexisting with one another. I love that push and pull because we need each other. We need to be in conversation with people whose ideologies are different from ours. It doesn't have to be a fight all the time. We all can afford to stop talking so much and just start listening more. And live theater demands that of us. If we see you with a phone, the ushers will come and take your phone away. I know that is a daunting prospect to a lot of people because it's much easier operating under this idea that we can't have a long attention span. Once you get comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable, you learn so much more.

Suffs is a musical about powerful women fighting relentlessly for justice, equality, and our fundamental rights. Who’s a powerful woman in your life who has inspired you? 

There's so many, I feel like I've been raised by women. My mother, of course. She was very young when she had me and we like to say we grew up together. Watching her navigate the world and figuring out her place in it as a young married mom in the 70s and 80s, knowing what I know now about that time in history — that just must have been incredibly hard for her. She and my dad never made my brother or me feel like we were anything less than loved and safe, and that is hugely impactful. I've had teachers in my life who have seen me and saw the weird introverted bookish kid who wasn't sure whether she fit in and let me be okay with it and didn't try to change me. And college friends I'm close with to this day. They are such grounded, strong, supportive women. They have been my soft place to fall for decades now, and I have been theirs, and that is an honor. It's a great honor of my life.

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Thank you to Marya Grandy and Broadway in Chicago for this interview!

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