What Would You Do? Suzie Miller Teases the Moral Dilemmas of INTER ALIA

When Suzie Miller brought Prima Facie to Broadway in 2023, the playwright sparked a conversation that stretched far beyond the walls of the Golden Theatre. Now, she's returning to New York with another play that asks audiences to wrestle with some complicated questions.

Inter Alia, Miller's latest work, arrives on Broadway this fall starring Rosamund Pike, following its acclaimed run at London's National Theatre. And this time around, Miller knows a little more about what to expect from New York audiences.

"I'm actually so excited to go back to New York," Miller told BroadwayWorld. "I had such a fantastic time when I was there with Prima Facie. And now I feel like I know how it all goes, so I can relax into it a bit and really just experience it."

Part of what Miller remembers most about Prima Facie's Broadway run was the response from audiences—and particularly the conversations that continued after the curtain came down.

"New York audiences are fantastic. They're just amazing. If they like something, they like it—absolutely all in," she explained. "I love that unrestrained excitement."

Those conversations also helped plant the seed for Inter Alia. During Q&As for Prima Facie, Miller repeatedly heard from mothers who connected deeply with the play's examination of sexual assault and the legal system, but were left grappling with another question: What does all of this mean when you're raising a boy?

"A lot of the people that asked me questions were mothers really saying, 'Yes, yes, of course I believe this and I see it and I see how hard it is, but what do we do when we have boys?'" Miller recalled. "I have a son and a daughter, and it was really important to me to look at that question, and I didn't have the answer."

Not having an answer, Miller says, is exactly where theatre can become most useful.

"For me, theater is about starting conversations. It's not about providing the answer," she said. "It's about prizing out all the kind of sinews and muscle fragments of a problem and exposing it to an audience so that they're the ones thinking about the solution."

At the center of Inter Alia is Jessica, a successful Crown Court judge whose professional convictions and personal life suddenly collide. For Miller, that conflict offered a way to explore an especially thorny question: "What do you do when your feminism and your maternal love come into conflict?"

"What do you do [if] your son turns into the person that you didn't want to raise him to be, and that maybe you smugly thought would never happen to you?" she asked. "All those of us that do have children, that do have hopes for them and do have ideas about how we will bring them up, have all been that kind of smug 21-year-old that thought, 'When I have kids, I'll do it like this.' I wanted to really put that under a microscope."

As Miller began writing, however, she realized that the play was interrogating much more than the relationship between a mother and son. Jessica is a woman at the top of her profession, but at home, she is still carrying responsibilities that often go unnoticed.

"We never see the invisible work that women do in relationships, in families, in caring, in motherhood, in running households," Miller said. "They [carry] the emotional weight and they do the emotional lifting in any family structure."

"I wanted to make what was invisible, visible."

Miller illustrates that idea almost immediately. At the beginning of the play, Jessica is presiding over a case, firmly in command of her courtroom, when she notices eight missed calls from her son. Fearing an emergency, she adjourns the proceedings and urgently calls him back.

"The first thing he says is, 'Can't find my shirt,'" Miller laughed. "All the women in the audience know that they've had a call like that. And they just hear them laugh with absolute affection for her and knowledge—and her going, 'That's the emergency?'"

It's a funny moment, but one that establishes the balancing act at the heart of Jessica's life.

"That is something we don't even put on our tally list of the things we've done that day—the amount of moving and shaking we had to do," Miller explained. "I really wanted to make it visible, but also make it humorous so that people can see it and feel it, and that the men in the audience go, 'Oh, I didn't know.'"

That pressure extends to Jessica's marriage as well. She has become a judge before her husband, Michael, and Miller was interested in what happens to the dynamics of a relationship when a woman becomes the more professionally successful partner.

"As women are getting more [successful], they're starting to get those big jobs. They're starting to be more visible and have power within their domestic relationships," she said. "For women all over the world, there's no template to be more successful than your partner, because traditionally we've always seen that when men are more successful, no one even speaks about it."

Miller's exploration of Jessica's life was informed in part by conversations with ten female judges. What emerged was a portrait of a woman who is extraordinarily capable in the courtroom while still being expected to carry an enormous emotional and domestic load outside of it.

"She's someone who is juggling all of that as she's running a court that is deciding the outcome for people's lives," Miller said.

And then Miller puts that woman into what she calls "the biggest dilemma you can imagine being in as a mother."

It's there that Inter Alia pushes Jessica (and the audience) into much murkier territory, where professional principles, maternal instincts and ideas of truth don't necessarily point in the same direction.

"What about your values, and what do you do at the end when you're a lawyer and you know a way forward that will actually really destroy somebody because it's not the truth, but you will save your son?" Miller teased. "What decision do you make?"

She's not revealing the answer.

"At the end, she makes a decision. She makes a few different decisions," Miller said. "I won't tell you. I'll let you see the play."

Like Prima Facie, Inter Alia also gives Miller the opportunity to place a complicated female character squarely at the center of the story- something she has long been passionate about as a playwright.

"When I went to London, I started writing from a female perspective because I was fascinated by it," she explained. "I'd seen that male actors go from Hamlet to all the others in between and end up doing Lear as a sort of trajectory of their extraordinary life and range, whereas women just didn't have those plays."

"I thought, wouldn't it be great to write some plays for young women where they absolutely get to belt out their complete and utter talent and wow the world? And then also write [about] the middle section of women's lives when they're mothers."

Pike, she says, has embraced the opportunity to step into that spotlight.

"The women that I've worked with have just been phenomenal," Miller said. "They've embraced that concept of, 'Let me step into that light and really be the center of attention.'"

But Miller is quick to point out that Inter Alia isn't interested only in Jessica's perspective. Michael, her husband, has his own moment of vulnerability that has prompted an especially strong reaction from male audience members.

"Every man that comes out of my show says to me, 'I get that. And now I'm going to go home and walk my son around the block or around the park,'" Miller said.

That aspect of the play grew partly from a conversation Miller had with a man in New York after Prima Facie. He admitted to her that some men struggle to speak to their sons about sex and consent because doing so means reckoning with the standards and behavior of their own youth.

"I think a lot of men are scared to talk about this because we look back over our 20s," Miller recalled him telling her. "Even though we don't think we assaulted anyone, we can't be completely convinced that we checked in to make sure there was consent."

For Miller, that silence has consequences.

"Now, let's say men are the ones that are sort of not talking to their sons, and their sons are turning to the manosphere or to 24/7 porn to get an education around sexuality," she said. "We need to sort of interfere with that right now."

Those questions of truth, responsibility and the systems people inherit connect Inter Alia directly to Miller's broader body of work. In fact, she confirmed that Prima Facie and Inter Alia are part of a planned trilogy. She's already researching the third installment, which will turn its attention to the jury system.

"I've looked at the judiciary, I've looked at the complainants and the lawyers, and I wanted to look at Regular People coming to the jury and what they bring with them," she explained. "Some of that is stereotypes and some of that are life experiences, and how they come together and reach a decision that is not necessarily the utter truth—it's the best of their ability as a group of 12 to come to that conclusion."

Before she puts pen to paper on that play, however, Miller has some business to attend to in New York.

"I'm [not starting] until I've gone to New York and watched Inter Alia and hung out with everyone I know in New York," she laughed.

So what should Broadway audiences expect when they finally experience Inter Alia for themselves?

"You know, audiences come out quite gobsmacked, actually, which I love," Miller said.

Unlike Prima Facie, she explained, the central circumstances of Inter Alia may be more removed from many audience members' personal experiences. But the pressures surrounding Jessica—the career, the family, the endless unseen work and the impossible decisions—have proven strikingly recognizable.

"I think everyone will have had this experience of being a woman in a man's world," Miller said, "and a woman who doesn't realize how much they're doing that's silent until it gets pointed out to them how much they're doing, and then they see themselves reflected back."

And when the play reaches its most difficult moments, Miller hopes audiences will find themselves asking the question that sits at the center of so much of her work: "What would I do?"

It's a question she believes theatre is uniquely equipped to ask.

"We basically assemble as strangers and humans in a live forum," Miller said. "You watch something unfold live onstage shoulder to shoulder with complete strangers, and you together, at the same time, breathe in the emotional mist of what you're experiencing onstage and interpret it as real—knowing it's not, but suspending your disbelief together around this kind of moment of intensity."

In London, Miller could feel when Inter Alia had audiences completely in its grip.

"There's utter silence in the theatre," she recalled. "In those moments of utter silence, which happen at various points throughout the play, you can hear a pin drop. And that to me is when theatre is really—it's doing something. Whether it's doing something good or bad, I don't know, but it's doing something because audiences are on high alert and they want to know what's going to happen."

Now, she hopes Broadway audiences will experience the same thing—and perhaps leave the theatre looking a little differently at their own lives.

"I just hope that for the audiences in the U.S., as it's happened to the audiences in the U.K., that they will start to reframe how they think about their relationships, their connections as a family, their careers, the silent work that women constantly do," Miller said. "I just hope that I have lots of conversations with women and men afterwards about their experiences of the work."

After all, for Miller, those conversations are ultimately the point.

"The feedback that I often get is that they go out for dinner afterwards and it starts a really complex conversation," she said. "And that to me is everything."

Inter Alia will open on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre on December 1, 2026.