ALICE PAUL WASShe was a notoriously opaque figure with a monomaniacal focus. Susan Ware, one of many scholars Taub consulted with, wrote that she had no personal life. “She never married, never had a partner, we don’t know about her sexuality,” Taub said.
What helped unlock the character, Taub said, was Paul’s “deep, fraught, crazy-making friendships” with other suffragists, which Taub said were not so different from hers with her collaborators.
“It was that stew of ‘We love each other, we’re hanging out but you’re driving me crazy, we have to do this thing, I don’t want to mess around, I want to work,’” she said, doubling the tempo on her normal mile-a-minute speech.
Initially, Taub, whose acting credits also include the Off Broadway productions of “Hadestown” and “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812,” imagined she might play Doris, whom she described as “the writer-downer, like Mark in ‘Rent.’” But she eventually connected with what she called Paul’s “fear of failure” — and also, as anyone who has watched the 5-foot-3 Taub in action for five minutes might notice, with her intense focus and make-it-happen energy.
Taub said she even briefly entertained having the suffragist and labor lawyer Inez Milholland (played by Phillipa Soo, from “Hamilton”), who led the 1913 parade, appear onstage on a real horse. “For a minute, I was like, ‘How much would it cost to shut down Lafayette Street for four hours?’” she said.
By late 2019, the plan was to open at the Public in September 2020, shortly after the centennial of the 19th Amendment — and a few months before the presidential election. The pandemic struck. “It took a minute for it to really drop that it wouldn’t be happening,” Taub said.
Then, in June 2020, came the George Floyd protests, and intense discussions about structural racism in the theater world, including at the Public, which in May 2021 announced a broad “anti-racism and cultural transformation plan.”
Source: NY Times