Exclusive: On SUFFS and Motherhood

As the 77th Annual Tony Awards quickly approach, BroadwayWorld has invited the producers of the Best Production nominees to reflect on their experiences in bringing their shows to Broadway in this stellar season.

Today, we hear from producer Rachel Sussman, who contributed the below essay about her six-time Tony-nominated Best Musical, Suffs.

In the last two months, I’ve become a mother of two. Granted, only one of them is a one-week-old human, birthed by my luminous wife. The other is an original, new musical I’ve been shepherding as the co-lead producer for the past decade that finally opened on Broadway this spring: Suffs by Shaina Taub at the Music Box Theatre.

As I reflect on these two seemingly different birthing experiences, I’ve come to recognize how connected they really are. At the end of the day, a creative producer is a kind of doula - vigilantly guiding, gently challenging, and fervently advocating for the artists and their vision through the process of gestating a new musical. Like these early day of motherhood, it’s a combination of trusting the process while learning and adjusting as needed.

The role of a producer is dynamic and nebulous – there’s no roadmap, it’s riddled with contradictions, and the priorities evolve in real time. Ask any producer what it is they do and you’re likely to get a different answer. One of my favorite quotes about producing comes from Oscar Hammerstein II: “The definition of a producer: An idealist, a realist, a practical dreamer, a sophisticated gambler and a stage-struck child.” As a co-founder of the educational initiative, The Business of Broadway (alongside Erica Rotstein, Heather Shields, and Sammy Lopez) we define a lead producer as being “the CEO of a startup” with the startup being the show, of course. And since the theatre business is one of high risk and no guarantees, the essential ingredient in producing a show must be unbridled passion.

When I first embarked on the idea for a suffrage musical, I was 24 years old and working my very first job out of undergrad as an assistant in a theatrical producing office. I had little commercial experience, but an insatiable curiosity and urge to share this story on stage, one that had been brewing inside me since I first learned about the American women’s suffrage movement as a preteen in a Metro Detroit public middle school. The rich history, the complex, real women, the internal tensions, and the intergenerational conflict felt so inherently dramatic to me. I mean the suffs really *did* get arrested for obstructing traffic and went on hunger strike! Carrie and Mollie really *were* “best girlfriends” and are buried next to each other! Doris *did* marry Dudley! You can’t make this shit up! Not to mention the fact that I desperately felt the overlooked history of radical women in this country deserved a platform to be acknowledged alongside all of the endless male protagonism we perpetuate.

I reached out to the inimitable artist Shaina Taub in 2014 to share this passion and ask if she would be willing to write a musical about the suffrage movement. She said yes, then the savvy Jill Furman said yes to being my producing partner, and then the clear-eyed Leigh Silverman said yes to directing. Those early years were filled primarily with research and uncovering the spine of the story. Cut to 2018 when The Public Theater agreed to collaborate as our nonprofit partner to continue developing the “Suffrage Project” further. Shaina would write demos and outlines of the narrative arc, Leigh would dive into the trenches dramaturgically, Jill and I would build the container and timeline for the artistic work to thrive, assess the learnings, rinse and repeat. We began to add actors into the process for readings and workshops so we could take a step back, really listen, and decide on the appropriate next development steps to take. (As an aside, Nikki M. James and Jenn Colella have been with us since our initial “sing-thru” of the first handful of songs in January 2018.)

Over the course of Suffs’ creative process, I also became familiar with the role of the producer as a filter. After opening our premiere production at The Public Theater in Spring 2022 - smackdab in the middle of the pandemic! Fun! – Jill and I felt accomplished, but knew there was work ahead. Musicals take years to develop internally, but it isn’t actually a piece of theatre until you add in the audience – the audience teaches you what the show is and what it still requires. We received constructive feedback from folks - critics, audience members, and industry colleagues alike - on what we should change, cut, add, replace, you name it. Producers are the first line of defense for our artists - it’s our job to protect them and create an environment where it’s safe enough to take bold, creative risks. Oftentimes this also means making ourselves available for hard conversations with the public to identify not necessarily answers, but trends: what is at the root of that piece of feedback? What are we consistently hearing and how do we then translate that in a way that is both effective and motivating for our artists? It was evident to us, as well as Shaina, Leigh and our brilliant music supervisor Andrea Grody, what the symptoms were, but not yet how to diagnose them.

There was certainly a moment where we all could have done some hand-wringing, shrugged, and said, “well, we tried.” But that’s not the kind of women or collaborators we are. Instead, relying on our passion and profound belief that Suffs deserved more life, we doubled down (not unlike the real-life suffs in their own pursuit of the vote). We spent the next two years laser focused on how to take Suffs from a show of width – too much historical accuracy, detail, and length – to one of depth – rigorously distilling the plot to instead offer more space to humanizing our characters and their relationships to one another. We wanted our audience to relate to and cheer for our suffs, in spite of and because of their flaws - especially our protagonist, Alice Paul. Shaina poured her soul into writing and rewriting to generate some of my new favorite songs and scenes (“Worth It” breaks my heart every time and “Great American Bitch” never ceases to make me smile). As captain of our ship, Leigh reconceived our whole design concept and we brought on new creative team members, including our indelible choreographer Mayte Natalio to embody the raw energy and spirit of the women within the constraints of the period. 

As one of our suffs, the ever-eager Doris Stevens says near the end of the musical, “I’ve always believed that we would finish the fight”, I too believed that Suffs would one day make it to Broadway. I do not identify as an optimist, but I am an audaciously hopeful person and subscribe intensely to Rebecca Solnit’s belief that hope is an embrace of the unknown and in uncertainty is the spaciousness for you to take action and impact the potential outcome. (Check out Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark - this ethos is interwoven throughout Suffs. You won’t be sorry.) The journey has been packed with twists and turns, but we proudly and collectively willed it into existence and we are now nominated for a whopping six Tony Awards which continues to feel surreal and wonderful and validating.

And strange as it may seem, producing Suffs has helped prepare me for this next chapter of Motherhood: the capacity for midnight oil, guts under pressure, and above all else, an unwavering, pure love. In her final moments alone with Alice in Suffs, Carrie Catt has an epiphany of becoming the “careful Mother” wherein she not only silently accepts but welcomes the next generation picking up the torch to continue bettering the world. One day I hope to share with my feminist son the story of how he was born to two mommies during such an intensely overwhelming and joyful time, and how I wouldn’t change a thing.

Rachel Sussman is a Tony Award-winning creative producer, educator, and entrepreneur. She is a co-founder of The MITTEN Lab, an early career theatre residency in her native Michigan, as well as The Business of Broadway, an educational venture that democratizes commercial producing knowledge to transform the way artists and producers collaborate. Broadway producing credits include: Suffs (Tony nomination), Just for Us (also on HBOMax), Parade (Tony Award), Prima Facie, and What the Constitution Means to Me (Tony nomination, Pulitzer Prize finalist). Select Off-Broadway credits: The Woodsman (Obie Award), The Appointment. A former WP Theater Lab Time Warner Foundation Fellow, Rachel was the recipient of the 2018 Prince Fellowship in Creative Producing, founded by Hal Prince in conjunction with Columbia University and named one of Variety’s 2023 “10 to Watch on Broadway.” She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts, BerkleeNYC, and NYU Tisch. She is a University Honors Scholar alumna of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. www.rachel-sussman.com