The activists can’t agree on whether it’s better to work within the system or explode it.
Some insist they fight for everyone at once; others are sure that’ll backfire. The movement’s veterans are stuck in the past, new recruits say — until the torch passes, and the enfants terribles find themselves the old fogeys.
Shaina Taub’s Tony Award-winning musical “Suffs” is about the fight for women’s right to vote, but the internecine fault lines it traces haven’t gone away. To witness the show, which tours to BroadwaySF’s Orpheum Theatre, is to feel acutely how every successive fight for equality has pitted idealism against pragmatism all over again.
It’s also a spur, reminding us that in the fight of Alice Paul (Maya Keleher), Ida B. Wells (Danyel Fulton) and Carrie Chapman Catt (Marya Grandy), much business remains unfinished.
Leigh Silverman directs the musical, a welcome complication to whatever you remember from history class.