Suffs Director Leigh Silverman Is Nominated for Her Second Tony—and This Time, She Appreciates the Company

Few things are more agonizing than the lethargy of progress. Shaina Taub’s musical Suffs theatricalizes just the last seven years of the fight for the 19th Amendment, and even without the context of the 65 years of fighting that came before the show’s hero Alice Paul took up the suffrage mantle, audiences can feel the arguments for keeping a cool head wear thin. Director Leigh Silverman has lived with this story and its clashing factions of forbearing diplomats and obstinate bulldozers for nearly a decade, all the while pushing ahead in her own patience-testing march. That is, building a brand-new musical—one with the audacity to have Broadway aspirations while being about women, by women and performed by an entirely female and nonbinary cast.

Silverman’s work on Suffs has earned her a Tony nomination—her second in a densely packed career that rarely accommodates moments of pause. “I will say, it feels sweet to be recognized,” she acknowledges, knowing full well her vocation as the creative support for new works and their writers leaves her contributions largely hidden—“very much my own design,” she adds. It’s a burst of personal validation for sure, something a life in the theater isn’t quick to offer. But given the company in which she finds herself on this year’s Tony roster, it’s also proof of Suffs’ own optimistic credo. The one that promises that progress is happening, even when everything feels painfully still.

“In 2006, I was the seventh woman to ever direct a Broadway play.” Silverman repeats: “In 2006. The seventh woman.”

The play was Lisa Kron’s comic drama Well, which she also directed at the Public Theater in 2004, her off-Broadway debut. Eighteen years and nearly 40 New York directing credits later, the landscape is notably different. “There are seven women nominated this year for Tonys,” she says. Her ear for narrative beats can’t resist the poetic symmetry.

For the first time in history, women outnumber the men in both directing categories. For Best Direction of a Musical, Silverman is joined by Merrily We Roll Along’s Maria Friedman, Water for Elephants’ Jessica Stone and The Outsiders’ Danya Taymor (Hell’s Kitchen director Michael Greif is the lone male nominee). Meanwhile, the Best Direction of a Play category includes Mary Jane’s Anne Kauffman, Appropriate’s Lila Neugebauer and Jaja’s African Hair Braiding’s Whitney White (Purlie Victorious’ Kenny Leon and Stereophonic’s Daniel Aukin round out the category).

“I just think that feels significant,” Silverman says. "It feels to me that women directors are taken more seriously and we're not such an anomaly." Though with the defiance of a Suff, she reveals an allergy to complacence. “Broadway remains generally inhospitable to women, and women of color specifically.” Her subtext speaks to the danger of declaring victory too soon. “But it's a history-making season and I really am enormously honored to have a piece of it.”

Silverman clearly remembers her first Tony season. It was exactly 10 years ago when she was nominated for directing a revival of Jeanine Tesori and Brian Crawley’s musical Violet, starring Sutton Foster, which she initially mounted unassumingly as a one-night concert at New York City Center—part of the debut season of Encores! Off-Center. “I had not really ever directed musicals before Violet,” she explains. “To be nominated in that moment was such a surprise and it was so incredible. I cared about that show so much.” Silverman was also the only woman in both directing categories—a nice coup for her, but one that had some unintended consequences. “All people really asked me about was what I was going to wear,” she remembers. “It was a very strange, lonely experience.”

It's rare to hear Silverman describe anything having to do with the theater as “lonely.” She’s a creature of collaboration who identifies her relationships with writers as her “only measure for success as a director of new work.” She’s already deep in conversation with David Henry Hwang about their fall Broadway revival of Yellow Face, a play they opened off-Broadway in 2007. The pair also collaborated on the 2011 Broadway production of Chinglish and the 2019 Hwang-Tesori musical Soft Power (which ironically places Suffs’ starriest producer, Secretary Hillary Clinton, at the center of a political fever dream).

Silverman finds creative partners like a heat-seeking missile, clocking every opportunity to build something new with artists as passionate as she is. Her match with Taub happened right after the 2014 opening of Violet when Suffs producer Rachel Sussman took her to one of the singer-songwriter’s Joe’s Pub concerts. “I was like, well, I want to work on a musical with her—now that I'm a musical director!”

After that, it was workshop after workshop, learning with Taub how to shape and distill a story that was being tossed around by the politics of the day. “When we first started working on it, it was a very strong reaction to the last administration,” she says. “After Biden, I think in a way we could let go of some of that.” They finally got their world premiere in spring 2022 at the Public Theater, a mid-pandemic production that was too stop-and-start to be what they wanted. “I don't think anyone felt like they could do their best work,” Silverman states frankly, recounting supply chain issues and a wave of COVID running through the cast during their third week of previews. “We canceled our whole opening week, we lost our whole third extension to COVID. It had this feeling of almost not really happening.”

The next three workshops were done without a guarantee of any future life. “There are plenty of times where people take leaps and it doesn't work out,” says Silverman—a lesson a few decades in the theater teaches you. Then again, she says, there are the times, like with Suffs, when “circumstances all come together where it feels like you're flying.” Two of those circumstance were undoubtedly Secretary Clinton and Malala Yousafzai, who joined the show’s Broadway producing team. But it’s the power of the collective that stands out in Silverman's mind. “You can feel the company's enthusiasm for telling the story, their love for each other,” she says. “They believe in it, and they believe in what we've all made together.”

Fittingly, it was this picture of unified purpose that also focused her direction for the Broadway production. In the last of “a hundred million” rewrites of the song, “Finish the Fight,” Taub wrote the lyrics: “I want to march in the street / I want to hold up a sign / I want to march with millions of women with passion like mine.” “It was the first time that Alice articulated what her dream was,” says Silverman. “As soon as I read those lyrics, I was like, ‘We should see in that moment what she's picturing. We should see the whole company in silhouette.’ It really unlocked everything.”

The silhouette became the subtle narrative throughline of the whole show: A vision of a sisterhood just out of reach; that dream made manifest at the historic 1913 march in D.C.; and an identical image receding into the shadows as the rising generation decides who will fight the next round.

“Our experience of being passionate, driven, dedicated women who are working really hard on a thing that we want to achieve has this weird meta resonance with the show,” Silverman says, finally naming the self-referential story that Suffs—knowingly or not—wears on its sleeve. “When we're thinking, ‘How can we continue both in the theater and in the world?’ And ‘How do we marry our activism and our art?’ You just have to look to the show.”

You can also look to Silverman’s rehearsal rooms. “I have spent a lot of my career trying to make rooms that are more equitable in whatever way I can do that,” she says. “I think this company is an extraordinary representation of that.”

Among the most visible examples is the casting of ensemble member Jenna Bainbridge, only the second wheelchair user to perform in a Broadway musical. And then there’s the queer love story—understated but visible—between Carrie Chapman Catt (Jenn Colella) and Mollie Hay (Jaygee Macapugay). “It’s a little bit of a ‘if-you-know-you-know’ kind of experience,” says Silverman. “Some people really see it from the beginning, and other people don't notice ‘til the end.”

Dudley Malone and Doris Stevens, whose love story we get to follow throughout the show, are also played by two women (Tsilala Brock and Nadia Dandashi). Near the end of the show, they share a kiss on stage, as do Catt and Hay. “Whenever people talk about that moment, they always talk about it as being a straight couple and a gay couple, and it always makes me laugh a little bit on the inside,” she says cheekily. “I’m always happy to have two women kissing on stage.”

It's those small but intrepid details that make Suffs feels like the season’s renegade musical. “Broadway wasn't built on the idea that we would be let in to tell this story,” Silverman remarks, briefly assuming a 10,000-foot view of all the ground she and Taub covered while heads were down. “And I mean, so much of working in theater is just continuing to work until they force you to stop—because there's always more to do.” She laughs. “Now I really sound like Alice Paul.”

And like Paul, she subsists on a diet of small, hard-won victories. A rehearsal room built with care, the rare epiphany that unlocks the heart of a story, the moments of collaboration with artists who share her vision for both the stage and the world.

Her latest triumph: “Nobody at the Tony meet-the-press event asked me what I was going to wear.”