Review: SUFFS at Blumenthal Performing Arts

A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.

--Lao-tzu (604-531 B.C)

In the spheres of civil rights and progressive reform, there is an eternal division among activists. Do we amiably rely on persuasion and enlightenment to gradually win over skeptics, traditionalists, and staunch opponents? Or do we stand righteously on principle and demand justice now? Debate or declare all-out war? Gather votes or inflame discontent? Convince or conquer?

Shaina Taub’s Suffs, an audacious, anything-you-can-do response to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, considered those alternatives all evening long at Belk Theater as the national tour touched down in Charlotte this week. Portraying suffragist Alice Paul, the firebrand who wrests leadership of the movement from Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association Taub — and now, on the tour, Maya Keleher — can admire her elder’s stately bearing and appreciate her accomplishments.

But that supplicating “Let Mother Vote” attitude has to go, no matter how quaint and precious Marya Grandy’s warbling makes it sound.

From Paul’s standpoint, back in 1912, when this final surge toward passing the 19th Amendment begins, Catt and NAWSA have failed to deliver the goods to the new generation. She is disinclined to keep persuasion and afternoon tea in the movement’s arsenal. With so much work left to do, more than a century later, on women’s rights, gender rights, civil rights, workers’ rights, and other back-order items, including racial and class equity, we tend to empathize with Paul.

That’s easy enough, and the reaction of the opening night crowd, ignited by Keleher’s dynamism and Paul’s slogans, including the catchy “putting the rage back in suffrage,” was more like rabid enthusiasm than empathy. Yet Taub strives for balance throughout the evening, hinting that Catt’s persistence must be valued and emulated, pointing out that Paul’s focus may have been too narrow. At the key moment — when a mother’s heartfelt pleas sway her son’s swing vote in the Tennessee State Senate — we see how persuasion and persistence combine to achieve victory.

Laudably, Taub is giving us some complexities to consider. What ultimately unites our onstage activists in Suffs is their adherence to the basic Tao maxim of the old Chinese master. They all take that necessary first step. They remain committed until the journey is done. They may set out toward different destinations, they may move cautiously or rashly, patiently or precipitously, but they all take that single step. Activists act.

Yet as readily as the audience reacted, were they challenged at all to look inward and ask, “What are we doing?” What am I doing? Maybe if we were watching Suffs on the night after Nicole Good was murdered on the streets of Minneapolis, a fierier rage might have been evoked, some of it directed at ourselves and what we did with our priceless votes.

So maybe it’s too bad that Suffs needs the complicity of current news events to emphatically make a more impactful point. To hit us hard enough.

The Black activists, Danyel Fulton as the stately Ida B. Wells and Trisha Jeffrey as the more pragmatic Mary Church Terrell, take opposing stands when told that their interests must take a backseat in the suffrage movement — and that they must march in a segregated delegation. Here again, when Fulton rather than Jeffrey is the first to sing “Wait My Turn,” it comes across as a powerful grievance and denunciation rather than a resigned lament. Suffs resonates with where Taub’s heart is.

Yet Wells does join the suffragists’ glorious DC march, sharing the spotlight with Monica Tulia Ramirez as Inez Milholland, the dashing gladiator on the white horse. That’s another subtlety that Taub captures: Paul’s pragmatism. She realizes that she is the idea person driving the movement, crafting the marches and the protests — but she needs a true charismatic like Milholland to whip up righteous impulses into rage and conquering fury. To grab attention rather than hoping for it.

What that gladiator on a white horse also demonstrates, gilded helmet and all, is that a strategy that seems downright dopey today — a black and white photograph is projected upstage to reassure us that this stunt really happened — was once viewed as noble and inspirational. Nor is Taub hesitant about willfully altering our perspective. Women play all the roles in her history, including three key men.

Jenna Lea Rosen, brightly costumed as a Southern gentleman, is the Tennessee swing vote, while Jenny Ashman, often donning a formal top hat as President Woodrow Wilson, revels in the role of a slippery and opportunistic politician who postpones seeing the light until it makes him look good. Brandi Porter dutifully portrays Wilson’s chief of staff, Dudley Malone, who remains loyal to POTUS until he flips to the suffragist cause, either through persuasion or seduction.

By poopooing the importance of persuasion in winning the fight for suffrage, opting instead to highlight the suffragists’ non-violent bravery and heroism, Taub proves that you don’t need many men to tell their story. My wife Sue’s opening-night impression was that the men in the Belk Theater audience were enjoying Suffs even more than the women!

That wonderful void allows Taub to introduce more heroic women we’ve likely never heard of. Joyce Memei Zheng unexpectedly enters the fray as Ruza Wenclawska (Rose Winslow), the Polish-born labor organizer. We see Livvy Marcus rather misleadingly as Doris Stevens, portrayed here as Paul’s nerdy personal secretary — and the diffident temptress who conquers Dudley — skimming over her biography and her importance as a strategic mastermind.

In real life, Malone was Wilson’s Third Assistant Secretary of State. He did break with Wilson and support the suffragists, helping to secure Paul’s release when she was jailed for her protests against Wilson with the Silent Sentinels. Taub is even less flattering toward Catt, never mentioning the victories she achieved through her state-by-state approach — or that this strategy had to be replicated to ratify the 19th Amendment.

We might also fault Taub for favoring polemics over strict historical accuracy — or for limiting her male suffragettes to a single one. When Malone, Stevens, and Catt were belittled, we laughed and were entertained while we were educated. When the rhetoric became a bit repetitive, I found myself reflecting in the vein of Lao-tzu and the NFL’s Carolina Panthers: you’ve got to keep pounding to win.