Colorblind casting is popular now across films, television and Broadway, including in “SUFFS.” From “Bridgerton” to “Wonka” to an Agatha Christie story re-told with a Nigerian immigrant, there is a trend among creatives to embrace colorblind casting.
Most generously, the idea is that this sort of casting is inclusive and provides more work for a broader range of actors. For this, stories like the Nigerian Agatha Christie get pilloried for being “too woke.” But this isn’t the problem. The trouble with “Magical Multiracial Past,” as Kabir Chibber, writer at the New York Times names it, is that it creates stories that “tend to fail emotionally, deep down in the places a good story is meant to reach. The tales are often boring, marked by a well-meaning blandness — by an avoidance of uncomfortable truths.”
This is certainly true of “SUFFS.” It fails emotionally, and it is marked by a blandness in its avoidance of uncomfortable truths about the struggle over voting rights in this country. “SUFFS” is, in other words, a show about the blandness of white feminism, but it is dressed up as multiracial story. The colorblind casting in “SUFFS” is a way to deflect criticism and avoid the uncomfortable truth about the whiteness at the center of the story.
The most egregious and confusing colorblind casting in “SUFFS” has to be the character of Dudley Malone played by Tsilala Brock. Malone, like all the characters, is based on an actual historical figure. He worked as an aide to President Woodrow Wilson and became an ally to the suffragists, and eventually married Doris Stevens (who wrote Jailed for Freedom). Both Malone and Stevens were white, yet because Brock is cast, when the two appear on stage they look like an interracial couple to contemporary audiences.
At the performance I attended last Thursday, when Malone (Brock) first appears on stage, Wilson (Grace McLean) introduces the character as “this Irish man,” and there was an audible gasp from a theater-goer. When Malone and one of the suffragists, Doris Stevens (Nadia Dandashi), begin a romance and eventually marry, it obscures the fact that interracial relationships were illegal in the U.S. until 1967 and if they had been in such a relationship, it would have very likely ended in the lynching of one or both of them. Had the real Dudley Moore been Black, he also wouldn’t have been employed in the Wilson’s White House, as his racist policies deepened the segregation in civil service and beyond.
What’s more, when I saw the show at The Public Theater, Malone was fitted with a wig that was smooth and slicked back. On Broadway, Malone’s character has a textured wig. It is an interesting choice by the costume designer (Toni-Leslie James) director (Leigh Silverman) that I found puzzling. One wonders if this bit of dramaturgical gaslighting was designed to elicit the gasp from the audience. Listen, I love seeing a woman in a pants role - truly, I do - but in this case, beyond the kind of theatrical magic trick (“made you gasp!”), it confuses more than it illuminates.
Colorblind casting was (and is) part of the appeal in the hit show “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s retelling of the founding of the United States.
This colorblind retelling of history set to hip-hop beats opened in 2015 and became a pop culture phenom, but was not without critics, some who simply called it racist. The issue is really that “Hamilton,” like “SUFFS,” wants to be about history even as it revises it.
Writing about “Hamilton” in 2016, history professor Lyra D. Monteiro, said:
The play can thus be seen as insidiously invested in trumpeting the deeds of wealthy white men, at the expense of everyone else, despite its multiracial casting. It is unambiguously celebratory of Hamilton and Washington, and though it makes fun of Jefferson, he is nonetheless a pivotal figure. Sadly, that is where this revolutionary musical fails to push any envelopes: the history it tells is essentially the same whitewashed version of the founding era that has lost favor among many academic and public historians. Here there is only space for white heroes.
The comparison between “SUFFS” and “Hamilton” is apt because it is so clearly the model that Taub, Silverman and the producers of the show are following in their retconning of history. In the playbill for the show, Taub (playwright) and Silverman (director) appear under the headline, “Women’s History on Broadway.”
Taub and Silverman’s collaboration on “SUFFS” spans almost a decade at this point, yet they seem ontologically set against reaching beyond their limited take on white women’s empowerment. When the show was scheduled to move to Broadway, Taub wrote a letter to Hillary Rodham Clinton, telling her how she was “the root of inspiration for the show” and how “important it would be if she would join us.” According to this account, “Clinton responded to Taub’s letter right away.” The rest of the origin story of “SUFFS” hits the familiar notes of white feminism: 2016 presidential loss by Clinton, the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the urgency of “taking it to the streets” in the current moment. Silverman says, “we’re aligned in the kind of work we want to make…bold, unapologetic, feminist, funny, crazy, rigorous.”
But what kind of feminism? What kind of rigor? It is not an inclusive feminism nor is it rigorous in historicizing. By choosing to tell the story of the 19th Amendment through the lens of Alice Paul’s life, it makes Paul into an uncomplicated heroine without the racism that her contemporaries, including Mary Church Terrell, documented.
It is, one can only assume, the kind of retelling of history that Hillary Rodham Clinton is hoping for of her own record, one that leaves out the uncomfortable truths about her comments regarding young Black men as “super predators,” or supporting the 2002 invasion of Iraq in which over 300,000 people were killed.
Sitting in the theater last week, and before I’d read the Playbill, I had the distinct feeling that this is exactly the kind of bland, retelling of “women’s history” that a failed feminist presidential candidate might enjoy. To be frank, it’s the kind of story I was told in my first undergraduate class in gender studies (aka, “Sex Roles”) back in the mid-1980s. But we know more now about how gender and race work together. For example, we know from Stephanie Jones-Rogers’ powerful research in They Were Her Property, that white women were enslavers and especially cruel ones at that. This historical fact, nor the ardent racism of the white suffragists, are part of the supposedly rigorous history in “SUFFS.”
The creative choice to focus on the passage of the 19th Amendment through Alice Paul’s life is a deliberate one that ignores much of the story about voting rights for women in order to center an antiquated and discredited notion of feminism. The story in “SUFFS” is one that sees white women as the stand-ins for ALL WOMEN. It is one that imagines the world in binaries of male and female. It is an essentialist one that imagines women as inherently more nurturing, caring and above all progressive (or, at least Democratic) in their voting. Spoiler alert: white women got the vote, and it didn’t change electoral politics in any demonstrable way. It didn’t in the 1920s and it didn’t in 2016.
What’s on offer in “SUFFS” is a very particular version of feminism that presents little more than a comforting fiction about who we are and who we imagine ourselves to be as white women. It tells us that we have been excluded, persecuted even, and we have stood strong in our beliefs. Sure, but that is a half-truth that leaves out another, more uncomfortable truth: that a majority of white women have voted for the GOP and have for decades. Looking at the data on white voters from the Center for American Women in Politics (CAWP), fifty-five percent (55%) of white women voted for Trump in 2020. The percentage of white women voting for the GOP went up from 2016, a contradiction in white feminism that Angela Peoples and Kevin Banatte highlighted with their political art at the Women’s March in 2017 (above). “SUFFS” is the pink pussy hat musical no one needed.
While there is a shit-ton of political writing suggesting that the Democrat’s chances in the 2024 presidential election “depends on” women voters showing up and voting Blue, it is an invocation of “women” that obfuscates the reality that white women are not a reliable base for the Democrats.
You know who is a reliable base for Democrats? Black voters, and especially, Black women voters. In that same data from CAWP, 79% of Black men and 82% of Black women voted for Biden in 2020. It is precisely because of this that the Voting Rights Act is under attack, the Republicans know that they will lose at the polls in a truly multiracial democracy in which everyone has the right to vote and exercises it.
This assault on the voting rights of Black people was nowhere more tangible and heartbreaking than in the way two poll workers, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, were viciously and personally attacked by GOP thugs (they sued and won a defamation suit). Sitting in a performance of “SUFFS,” I was struck by how little space there is for Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman and their story in this play because center stage is a comforting fantasy for white women.
There are two Black women characters in the play, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell. In tomorrow’s post, I’ll take you through how these two venerable figures show up on stage in “SUFFS.”