Ming Peiffer, Whitney White and More Team up For FINISH THE FIGHT, a New Digital Performance

The New York Times has commissioned and is producing Finish the Fight, a masterful theatrical production in which acclaimed playwright Ming Peiffer (Usual Girls), 2020 OBIE-winning director Whitney White (Our Dear Dead Drug Lord, What to Send Up When It Goes Down), and a cast of celebrated actresses bring to theatrical life the biographies of lesser-known activists who helped to win voting rights for women. The play adapts the forthcoming book Finish the Fight!: The Brave and Revolutionary Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote, written by Times senior editor Veronica Chambers and fellow Times journalists. Finish the Fight premieres on Tuesday, August 18 at 7pm, when it will be available for free to viewers who RSVP in advance here.

Finish the Fight goes beyond familiar figures such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to shine light on the Black, Asian, Latinx, Native American, and diverse others who were at the forefront of the movement in the U.S. They were tireless organizers, tenacious fighters, and political geniuses, and together, laid the cornerstone for gender equality in the United States. The theatrical retelling contains invented scenes and imagined conversations among five women, though the events of their lives, and their accomplishments, are real.

In this world premiere, Harriett D. Foy plays Mary McLeod Bethune, the influential women's and civil rights activist; Zora Howard is Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, an abolitionist who co-founded the National Association of Colored Women and was the first African American to have a short story published in the United States; Q'orianka Kilcher portrays Yankton Dakota Sioux writer, artist, educator, and activist Zitkála-Šá; Leah Lewis is Chinese advocate for suffrage Mabel Ping-Hua Lee; and Chelsea Rendon plays Jovita Idár, a journalist and activist who fought on behalf of Mexican Americans and women.

The New York Times is also inviting readers to submit videos of themselves reciting names of other suffragettes and equality fighters, for possible inclusion in the production.

Finish the Fight culminates the New York Times' summer 2020 digital series "Unfinished Work," marking the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment and investigating the ongoing battle for women's rights in America. "Unfinished Work" is supported by Presenting Sponsor MassMutual.

For more information on the series, please visit https://timesevents.nytimes.com/.

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