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The Suffrajets Present A Musical S?ance

nytheatre.com review by Loren Noveck
August 15, 2005

Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin were amazing 19th-century personalities. Tennessee was a clairvoyant who supported her family as the “Wonderful Child” from a young age; Victoria received visions from spirit guides her whole life. They were the first women stockbrokers in New York, and gave financial advice to Cornelius Vanderbilt. They ran the newspaper Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, and were among the first women publishers. Victoria Woodhull ran for president in 1872, years before American women had the right to vote. And both sisters preached and practiced “free love”—at one point, Victoria, her husband, her ex-husband, and her lover shared the same New York apartment. There’s astonishingly ample material in the histories of these two to write probably a dozen plays, and I’m delighted that a group as stylistically inventive as the Suffrajets has jumped in.Tess Gill, Laurie Norton, and Dia Shepardson, creators of The Suffrajets Present a Musical seance, have crafted the sisters’ lives into an evening that feels like an old-time vaudeville show, with only two performers (Gill plays Victoria and the cello; Norton plays Tennie and the ukulele; Shepardson directs). Moving from 19th-century campaign songs to burlesque ditties to punk rock anthems, the piece inventively uses a mixture of musical numbers and short scenes to hit the high and low points of the sisters’ remarkable careers. Tom Bartos’s music is variegated in style and texture, and both performers’ musical talents are well-showcased.I think that large chunks of the prose were taken from historical documents—notably Victoria’s campaign speeches and speeches she made later in her life, when she was being shunned by “polite society” and the suffragette movement for her views on free love. (If they’re not actual historical text, kudos to whoever wrote them.) The speeches are completely fascinating as both pieces of forgotten history and as pieces of theater, and formed some of my favorite parts of the play.Some of the more traditional scenes are also quite effective. I was especially taken by one in which Tennie plies her trade as both spiritualist and dispenser of patent medicines to prostitutes, doing what may well be as much harm as good, but clawing her way to financial security all the while.On the other hand, I was less engaged by sequences in which the performers recite names of famous women throughout history, or run through women’s accomplishments since Woodhull and Claflin’s deaths. The larger contemporary relevance of their stories seems abundantly clear without explicitly calling attention to it in this way.I’ve long been fascinated by Woodhull and Claflin, and thoroughly enjoyed this journey through their checkered histories.