Sprawling demonstrations are as foundational to Washington’s architecture as the U.S. Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. But when Alice Paul and Lucy Burns organized the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession and more than 5,000 protesters marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, such a spectacle had never been seen.
It was that march that led Shaina Taub to envision the fact-based musical “Suffs.” As the playwright and composer read Doris Stevens’s 1920 book “Jailed for Freedom,” a first-hand account of the suffrage movement, she was struck by many things: the timeless struggle, the scrappy icons, the enduring influence. But the march helped convince her of the story’s inherent theatricality.
“They had literal choreography, pageantry, music — it was theater,” Taub says. “When I first read about that march and saw the old photos, I was like, ‘This is theater. This is theatrical.’ They understood the power of drama.”
Taub adapted that chapter of history into “Suffs,” a galvanizing show about the effort to ratify the 19th Amendment and give women the right to vote. After premiering off-Broadway in 2022, the musical hit Broadway two years later — with Taub starring as Paul — and earned its creator Tony Awards for best book and original score. Now, a touring production is bringing the story full circle for a run at the National Theatre — the venerable Pennsylvania Avenue venue.
In a recent video chat from New York, Taub, 37, reflected on her decade-plus journey with the show, its resonance in the current political climate and the significance of staging the musical in D.C.
(This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)
You began working on “Suffs” in 2014. What was it about the women’s suffrage movement that inspired you to write the show?
It just blew my mind that I’d made it to age 25 without learning this story, and the women I was reading about reminded me of my friends. It just felt like I’d been searching for this story of this group of stubborn, ambitious, passionate, messy young women taking on a challenge together. I had been working on a gender-flipped adaptation of “Robin Hood,” and I immediately shelved it because I was like, “This is what I’ve been searching for in myth and legend and fiction, but it’s actually here in my own backyard of American ancestors.”
“Suffs” features few male characters and derives its drama from exploring how different factions of women’s suffrage disagreed on how to achieve the same goal. What made you interested in exploring that conflict?
I knew pretty immediately that I did not want this to be a show where “good” progressives or liberals can sit in the audience and pat themselves on the back to be like, “We were on the right side of history.” That was completely uninteresting to me. I wanted to do something more complicated, more thorny, less comfortable. To me, what’s interesting dramatically and politically is: How do people who share a goal, in theory, have widely divergent ideas about how to achieve that goal? Also, it really helped me keep the focus on the women. I wanted to create a show that had tons of amazing roles for women and girls, hopefully to be done in schools and communities.
That also creates richer, more complicated characters.
And it’s not my job to be 100 percent historically accurate the way a museum or a history book is beholden to be. It’s not my job to make a moral judgment on these women and either glorify or vilify them. It’s my job to humanize them and to dramatize them in all of their messiness. Stories of feminist heroines of the past can be a bit one-dimensional. “Oh, these fearless, tireless women who did this great thing.” These women did fear. They did tire. They had egos. They had shortsightedness. They had blind spots. They messed up. They were flawed, ordinary people like us doing an extraordinary thing.
The show ran on Broadway during the administration of President Joe Biden and hosted a fundraiser for his reelection campaign. It counted Hillary Clinton among its producers. How do you feel about taking the show to D.C. during the second Trump administration?
I feel like we keep seeing this attack on our historical memory, and we keep seeing these efforts to suppress our national imagination, because I think authoritarian-style leaders don’t want us to remember our past. When we reckon with these stories and the things our ancestors did to fight for the people, we get ideas in our head about what we can accomplish. And I think they don’t want that. That’s why we see these attacks on PBS, on NPR, on the Kennedy Center, on our arts and storytelling institutions. So it’s up to us to get together in halls and public forums to tell these stories. We’ve got to hold on to that right for as long as we have it.
Roe v. Wade was overturned between the off-Broadway and Broadway runs of “Suffs.” How does an event like that underscore the topics this show is tackling?
Where to begin on that? Touring around the country in states where a lot of the women and girls going to see the show do not have autonomy over their bodies really is the definition of “the personal is political.” These things, especially with reproductive rights, are these abstract political issues until they happen to you. I’ve had my own brush this past year with needing reproductive care for a pregnancy loss, and it has really radicalized me to understand on a personal level what this care means. We keep having to fight these fights over and over.
Many events in the show — the Woman Suffrage Procession, the 1917 White House picketing — unfold in D.C. What does it mean to see this show performed in that city?
It’s such an honor and privilege to get to return some of these suffs back to D.C. — Inez Milholland, Alice Paul, Ida B. Wells — that all made history in that capital. To me, the great musicals that I revere and study and look up to — “Ragtime,” “Cabaret,” “Fiddler on the Roof” — every time they are produced, the conversation is so relevant, so timely. They always feel like they were written yesterday, today and tomorrow. They speak to whatever moment they’re in. I do not purport “Suffs” to join that esteemed company, but my goal with it was not to chase one specific political moment. My hope is that “Suffs” could be expansive enough to hold whatever American moment it is being performed in.
What do you hope audiences take from “Suffs”?
If you don’t believe women have the right to vote, you may not enjoy the show, and that’s fair. But my hope is that it’s expansive enough to hold you wherever you’re coming from, whatever you’re reckoning with. If you care about a better future for the next generation, I hope you can find something in the show to inspire you or make you think.
Suffs Through June 28 at the National Theatre, 1321 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. broadwayatthenational.com. $67-$299.
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