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      Shaina Taub’s ‘Suffs’ Tells the Suffragist Tale in Song

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      Shaina Taub’s highly anticipated musical explores women’s crusade for the vote through a movement often divided along generational, class and racial lines.On a recent afternoon, Shaina Taub was standing in a rehearsal room at the Public Theater with a group of 18 women in corsets and long skirts, paired with T-shirts and sports bras, planning a grand parade.Taub was suited up — halfway at least — as Alice Paul, a founder of the National Woman’s Party, and a main character of “Suffs,” her new musical about the women’s suffrage movement in the years leading up the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920.“How will we do it when it’s never been done?” Taub sang as the performers bustled up and down the risers. “How will we find a way where there isn’t one?”The song, “Find a Way,” was about the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Procession, the first large-scale political demonstration ever held in Washington. But Taub might have been singing about “Suffs” itself, and its winding, eight-year road to the stage after multiple pandemic delays, three set redesigns and script revisions prompted by the tumultuous politics of the country — and American theater — since the racial justice protests of 2020.“It’s amazing how much the experience of making the show mirrors what they were doing,” Taub said during a break. She slipped off her period-correct high-heeled Oxfords and put on cloth slippers. Would the corsets be staying for the real show?“It’s a hot topic,” Taub said. “But — yes.”From left: Ally Bonino, Phillipa Soo, Taub, Hannah Cruz and Nadia Dandashi in the musical at the Public Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn an age of riot grrrl playlists and “The Future Is Female” tattoos, it can be hard to see past the petticoats and big hats and recognize the “ladies” of the suffrage movement as the hard-nosed political strategists they were — and to fully appreciate the radical nature of their demands. “Suffs,” in previews now and scheduled to open April 6 at the Public, aims to release the movement from its starchy image, drawing on the sounds of Tin Pan Alley, early jazz, pop-gospel and what Taub calls “the sounds of the future the suffs were trying to create.”The highly anticipated production — whose extended run, through May 1, is already sold out — may wear its idealism on its sleeve. But it also digs into the complexities of a movement that was often sharply divided along generational, class and racial lines. That last was an aspect of the show, Taub said, that she worked to deepen after the murder of George Floyd.“I’m not trying to glorify or vilify,” Taub said. “I’m trying to humanize, and dramatize.”“SUFFS” BEGAN sprouting in 2014 when the producer Rachel Sussman (“What the Constitution Means to Me”) gave Taub a copy of “Jailed for Freedom,” Doris Stevens’s account of the militant suffragists who, in addition to organizing the parade, assembled the first picket of the White House, which led to dozens being arrested, beaten and force-fed in prison.She tore through it in a single night. “I couldn’t believe how dramatic it was,” she recalled.As an activist-minded theater kid growing up in Vermont, Taub, 33, had been fascinated by the history of the civil rights movement, ACT-UP and other social change movements. Why, she wondered after reading Stevens’s book, had she been taught virtually nothing about this one?“There’s just been this hidden treasure trove in my own backyard this whole time,” she said. “I emailed Rachel at 3 a.m. and said, ‘We have to do it!’”Making a musical just about women battling men didn’t seem very dramatic. “I thought the audience might be a bit ahead of it,” she said. But she saw potential in the internal conflicts.“How do various characters who do want the same things go about it differently?” she said. “That could help me focus on the women most of all.”Today, Taub, whose album “Songs of the Great Hill” will be released April 1, is an in-demand musical theater talent whose (many) other projects include a collaboration with Elton John on songs for a musical adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada,” set to open in Chicago this summer.But back in 2014, she was a singer-songwriter with regular gigs at Joe’s Pub and other venues. At the recommendation of Sussman (who also teamed up with the producer Jill Furman, of “Hamilton”) the director Leigh Silverman went to see her and instantly became, in Silverman’s words, “a crazed Shaina Taub superfan.”“I was just dazzled,” said Silverman, who at the time was directing her first musical, the Broadway production of “Violet.” “I just thought, how can I get attached to Shaina Taub forever?”Over the next two years, Taub worked on the musical between projects, including “Old Hats,” with the clowns Bill Irwin and David Shiner, and her original musical adaptation of “Twelfth Night,” for the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park. In late 2017, Taub played the first 20 minutes of music for Silverman.“It was thrilling,” Silverman said, before taking a long pause. “Those first 20 minutes did a thing I think the show does incredibly well, which is, it tells a story and gives you an emotional arc of character.”Jenn Colella (“Come From Away”), who plays Carrie Chapman Catt, the leader of the old-guard National American Woman Suffrage Association (who was often at odds with the more radical Paul), participated in the first workshop. She recalled an immediate “crackling of energy.”“We found ourselves sitting straight up, standing when we didn’t need to — crying,” she said. “From go, this was a moving piece.”From left, Jenn Colella, Taub and Susan Oliveras during a rehearsal.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTaub, who did historical research at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library and read what more than one collaborator described as seemingly every book on the subject, has laced the piece with quotes and detailed references. (She even found a juicy love story in a footnote. “Every musical needs a love story!” Taub said.) But “Suffs,” Silverman emphasized, is not an “eat-your-spinach history musical.”“We’ve done a lot of work around deepening all the characters, the friendships, the betrayals,” she said. “In a way, the movement is the protagonist.”ALICE PAUL WAS a notoriously opaque figure, with a monomaniacal focus and, as the historian Susan Ware (one of many scholars Taub consulted with) has written, 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. Then the pandemic hit. “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.”From the beginning, the show had addressed the uglier sides of a movement that reflected — and sometimes actively bolstered — the racism of American society. It was a time when Jim Crow had solidified and Woodrow Wilson (played in “Suffs” by Grace McLean) had presided over the segregation of the federal work force.One of the first songs Taub wrote was “Wait My Turn,” sung by the suffragist and journalist Ida B. Wells (played by Nikki M. James) in response to Paul’s decree that Black women would march in a separate section at the back of the 1913 parade, to appease Southern white marchers. (Wells refused, and marched with her state delegation.)But amid the 2020 protests, Taub and Silverman realized they needed to revisit not just the show itself, but also their approach to making it. “I realized I had more to do, and deeper to go,” Taub said.They brought in two additional collaborators to the core creative team, assembling an expanded dramaturgical brain trust, nicknamed the Coven, which started meeting weekly. It included Taub and Silverman, along with the choreographer Raja Feather Kelly (who is also credited as a creative consultant) and, as dramaturg, Ayanna Thompson, a prominent Shakespeare scholar at Arizona State University.Thompson, who became a scholar-in-residence at the Public in 2020, was initially puzzled by the invitation. (“The first thing she said to me was ‘I hate musicals,’” Silverman recalled.) In a video interview, Thompson said the idea of a musical about the suffrage movement initially sounded “like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch.”“I just thought ‘Oh my god, that’s the worst idea ever,” she said, imagining “the earnestness, the whiteness, the tweeness.”Cast members rehearsing “Watch Out for the Suffragette,” a vaudeville-style romp in which they portray jeering men.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Obviously, that was all my bad preconceived ideas,” she said. “There’s a really rich story here — not just about women battling men, but a really interesting intergenerational battle” that’s “almost Shakespearean in its complexity.”Thompson, who has written extensively on race and performance, also spearheaded a rethinking of the approach to casting. Most of the prominent characters — Paul, Catt, Wells, the Black suffragist Mary Church Terrell — are played by actors of the same race. But the other, mostly white characters, including male historical figures, were cast very deliberately with women and nonbinary actors of a range of races and ethnicities — not just for the sake of a diverse company, but to challenge assumptions about who gets to be (to use a favorite Thompson word) “virtuosic.”“We wanted to give women, and particularly women of color, the same kind of mutability usually granted to white men,” she said.A downtown choreographer and director, Kelly (“Fairview,” “A Strange Loop”), whose work has often examined issues of appropriation, said that when Silverman approached him last summer, he was initially hesitant. “I was like, ‘I’m not a woman,’” he said. “Was that going to be a thing for some people?”One of the challenges, he said, was creating a movement language that would help the audience figure out how to read the bodies onstage. The opening three songs, he said, set up some of the registers.The vaudeville-style romp of “Watch Out for the Suffragette,” sung by ensemble members costumed as jeering men (and inspired by real anti-suffrage songs of the period), is followed by the stylized proper-lady tableau of “Suffrage School” and then the naturalism of “Alice and Carrie,” which establishes the dynamic between Catt and the upstart Paul.As for the diverse casting, Kelly said, “something that was important to me was, how does the musical hold space for all these characters, and allow the perspective to shift, without feeling like it’s checking boxes?”Actors also helped push beyond the boxes. James, a Tony winner for “The Book of Mormon” who has been close with Taub since they both appeared in “Twelfth Night,” had been singing Wells’s number “Wait My Turn” for years at workshops and benefits. But after the summer of 2020, she said, “I started feeling pretty conflicted, and I think Shaina did, too.”In Taub’s initial script, Wells (who actually intersected very little with Paul or the National Woman’s Party after 1913) sang the song, then largely disappeared. “I really encouraged Shaina to find ways to give Ida more of a voice,” James said.Taub added a second-act song for Wells, in which she reflects on the personal costs of her battles. She also reworked a scene between Wells and the genteel Terrell, a founder of the National Association of Colored Women, in which they debate the merits of the inside game (“dignified agitation,” as Terrell, played by Cassondra James, puts it) versus confrontation.It’s a mirror of the conflict between Paul and Catt, with its interplay of sharp disagreement and mutual respect. “Two people can have the same goal, but totally different ideas about how to get there,” James said.“Suffs” is opening in the same theater where “Hamilton” — and America’s runaway romance with the roguish “ten dollar founding father” — was born. Are audiences open to seeing Taub’s feminist founding mothers as similarly three-dimensional heroes, shaded by their flaws rather than simply damned by them?“Suffs” may be about women. But their long fight for the vote, Taub said, can stand in for any of the great social movements in American history, all of which were also messy, fractious, imperfect — and unfinished.She cited a line from the last song: “Don’t forget our failure. Don’t forget our fight.”“You can hold both truths in your hand,” she said. More

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      ‘Intelligent Life’ Review: Cecily Strong’s ‘Awerobics’ Workout

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      Taking Lily Tomlin’s roles in a revival of Jane Wagner’s metaphysical comedy, the “Saturday Night Live” star is put through her paces.Of the many lines that have stuck with me since I saw the original Broadway production of “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” in 1985, perhaps the sharpest was the one that seemed aimed directly at my generation of disappointed go-getters.“All my life, I’ve wanted to be somebody,” a character named Chrissy says, “but I see now I should have been more specific.”Chrissy attends self-awareness seminars and considers suicide. She is angry at a world that offers “false hopes” but angrier at herself for failing to have it all. “I feel I am somewhat creative,” she explains to a friend after aerobics class. “But somehow I lack the talent to go with it.”That was never the problem with Jane Wagner’s play; it bristles with barbed insights that have kept me nursing the beautiful bruises for 35 years. And the good news is that in the revival that opened at the Shed on Tuesday night, starring Cecily Strong and directed by Leigh Silverman, many of those barbs are as piercing as ever, breaking the skin of American optimism. Wagner’s existential one-liners amount to a Rosetta Stone of sardonic comedy, an overlooked source of stylings typically attributed to men like Steve Martin, Steven Wright and Will Eno.Yet because those writers are part of a tradition that has rarely had much of interest to say about women, “Intelligent Life” has always seemed like a necessary corrective. Among the 14 characters Wagner wrote for Lily Tomlin — her partner then, and her wife since 2013 — just two were male; only one, a health nut by day and a cokehead by night, remains in the revised edition presented here.Though a few other characters have also been cut — including Judith Beasley, the hilarious Tupperware saleslady who shifted to sex toys — the 10 women Strong must play in split-second succession are sufficient to make the show an aerobics class of its own. That puts the focus more squarely on its mixed platter of female frustration. Kate, a socialite, thinks she may actually be dying of boredom. Agnus Angst, a throwaway teenager, screeches her punk poetry at an unloving world. Brandy and Tina, two cheerful prostitutes, get picked up by yet another john who turns out to be just a journalist.Strong stars as 10 women in the revival of Jane Wagner’s play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWagner works hard to particularize these women, but the play, which has over the years lost an intermission and been streamlined into one 95-minute act, has trouble getting started. In part that’s because the characters seem to have been reverse engineered from their aperçus. In her spoken-word act, Agnus intones, “The last really deep conversation I had with my dad was between our T-shirts.” Kate, who once dreamed of being a concert violinist but more recently lost the tip of a finger in a cooking class accident, muses, “What a tragedy if my dream had come true.”But the problem also derives from the network of random connections that tries to pass as architecture. Chrissy is linked to Kate by a discarded piece of paper; Kate to Brandy and Tina by a hairdresser; and everyone, we gradually understand, to a homeless woman named Trudy who wears pantyhose as a “theater cape” and a coat tasseled with Post-it notes. The play’s characters turn out to be figments of her imagination or emanations caused by her faulty neural wiring.That was always a bit twee, but today it’s also troublesome. The self-consciously cute Trudy, who claims to be chaperoning a bunch of aliens as they explore the byways of human society, may no longer be such a laughable figure, despite the umbrella hat she wears as a kind of interstellar satellite dish. Homelessness, which in Reagan-era New York City seemed to be a temporary aberration, has since curdled into something more like a structural disaster, making a permanent underclass of economic and mental health victims.Tomlin got around the problem, if it was one then, by taking a breezy approach, preserving the rhythms of the punch lines at all costs. She had, after all, become famous on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” a loosey-goosey, mile-a-minute variety show.But Strong’s ability to create and sustain outré characters who nevertheless remain fundamentally believable — a skill developed over 10 seasons on “Saturday Night Live” — works against our comfort in her New York stage debut. It’s harder to laugh at her Trudy, a figure of pathos with a squinty tic and a hunched gait that never lets you forget she is shadowed by danger.That commitment to at least a nub of naturalism keeps stepping on the jokes; the night I saw the play, a majority of the laughter seemed to come in response to the uncannily timed sounds of zippers zipping, bottle tops popping and water beds sloshing. (The sound design is by Elisheba Ittoop.) Otherwise Silverman’s staging seems to suggest we are in a liminal, performative space, with no set to speak of and with Strong (like Tomlin in the original play, but not the awkward 1991 movie) changing costumes only minimally. And though the lighting (by Stacey Derosier) helps separate the emotions, Strong’s voices are not yet ideally distinct.But just as I began to wonder whether I had misremembered what Trudy calls “the goosebump experience” — the feeling you get when moved by art — “Intelligent Life” pulled itself together. Dispensing with the variety format, and giving Trudy a 30-minute rest, the second half is mostly devoted to the story of three friends living through second-wave feminism, from the founding of the National Organization for Women to the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment. Edie is the militant one, with “Spanish moss” under her arms. Marge is the cynic: “Honey, you couldn’t be more antiwar,” she tells Edie. “But if it weren’t for Army surplus, you’d have nothing to wear.”And Lyn is the one caught in between, trying to be both Edie and Marge while also being a wife, a mother of boys, a rape hotline operator and a power-dressing P.R. executive. As the quick-take grievances of the earlier characters, however funny, give way to the ordinary wear-and-tear on women trying to function honorably in a sexist society, the play achieves, and Strong fulfills, the promise of the premise.That promise is paradoxical: In offering a pull-no-punches satire of self-involved humans, it is nevertheless filled with pity for their disappointments. But instead of seeing that as a fault, perhaps it’s better to say that by finally realizing the need to be “more specific,” “Intelligent Life” eventually replaces the cheap kind of uplift with the real deal. Trudy calls the emotional workout of human life “awerobics.” By the time you get to the play’s killer last line, you may call it a true goosebump experience.The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the UniverseThrough Feb. 6 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      Continuing ‘The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe’

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      Lily Tomlin, who first performed this comically cosmic play, and Jane Wagner, its author, discuss a new production with Cecily Strong and Leigh Silverman, its new star and director.Should you ever have the chance to converse with Lily Tomlin, you don’t have to tell her it’s an honor. “Believe me, it’s not,” Tomlin said recently in her distinctive deadpan.At 82, Tomlin is not precious about her reputation or the esteem she enjoys as a comedian and actor. But she remains fiercely proud of “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” the one-woman play that was written for her by Jane Wagner, her wife and longtime creative collaborator.“Search for Signs,” which had its Broadway debut in 1985, is a comedic and philosophical whirlwind in which Tomlin Ping-Ponged across 12 roles, including the sullen teen punk Agnus Angst; the feminist activists Edie, Lyn and Marge; and the wealthy, urbane Kate. Their scenes are framed and interwoven by the character of Trudy, an enlightened vagrant who believes she is in communication with aliens.Tomlin’s performance in the Broadway production of “Search for Signs” won her the Tony Award for best actress in a play. That production ran for more than a year, and the play became an emblematic entry in the careers of its author and its star; Tomlin continued to perform it in other cities, in a 1991 film adaptation and in a Broadway revival that ran from 2000-1.Lily Tomlin in “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” in 2000.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Search for Signs” has become a treasured work to performers like Cecily Strong, the “Saturday Night Live” cast member, and directors like Leigh Silverman (“Well,” “Violet”). As Silverman, 47, said, “This play gives us a sense of purpose and a meaning while telling us all the time how meaningless it is. It holds us up and supports us and loves us. It cherishes the audience in a way that no other theater experience I’ve ever had does.”Now Silverman is directing Strong in a new production of “Search for Signs” that will be presented at the Shed. This incarnation, which is choreographed by James Alsop, begins performances Dec. 21 and opens Jan. 11; its limited run is scheduled to end Feb. 6.While they are still working through the play’s ambitious and ample material, Strong and Silverman said their preparations are testing them to their fullest extents. “There’s no plan to this,” Strong, 37, explained. “I said nobody else bug me until February — all of my time and my brain and my heart and my soul is here, and that’s where it has to be.”Tomlin and Wagner, who are executive producing, are content to observe these rehearsals from afar, weigh in when needed and reflect on what the play has meant to them. (Or simply to kibitz affectionately, as in one moment when Tomlin turned to her wife and audibly observed, “We’ve lived a long time, sister.”)Wagner, 86, said she was confident in the approach that Silverman and Strong were taking. “I have such a feeling of security, really, with the two of them,” she said. “But now that you mention it, I’ll start feeling pressured again, I’m sure.”Tomlin, Wagner, Strong and Silverman gathered earlier this month for a video interview in which they spoke about their individual and collective journeys on “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.” These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Lily and Jane, can you recount the origins of “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe”? How was it created?JANE WAGNER I was in a New Age phase. I was reading some philosophy and I began to be aware that I was being aware. [Lily Tomlin laughs.] That’s an insight that I hadn’t even thought about having.LILY TOMLIN I was on the road a good part of that time.WAGNER Which was very good for us.TOMLIN She would send me a load of pages every now and then. I remember the first packet I got, I was playing in Lexington and she sent me a huge stack of papers all about Trudy. Every line, one after another, was so observant and perceptive. I read them at a show one night and there was a raucous and wonderful response. When I read Trudy saying, “Frankly, I think they find us quite captivating,” I knew where the play was headed. But I had no idea how she was going to get there.Tomlin, right, and Jane Wagner in 2001 with their Tony Award nominations for the revival of “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.”Henry Ray Abrams/Agence France-PresseCecily and Leigh, how did you each discover the play?CECILY STRONG The first time I encountered it was in my library in high school, looking for monologues. I was very serious about being an actor and I remember finding this cover with a long crazy name. What could this show be? I looked at a couple of Trudy monologues and I wanted to do something like this. This is a stupid thought, but I had it: I’ve got to marry a writer. I need to have someone write this show for me. I certainly never thought it would be a possibility to do this.LEIGH SILVERMAN I saw it at the Kennedy Center [after the show’s original Broadway run]. I was 11. My mother took me and we were sitting in the front row. It really sent me on a journey to see a performance like Lily’s. It was radical — written by a woman, performed by a woman who played all kinds of characters. Lily was so masculine, androgynous, highly feminine — she was all of it, the full package. I felt like my whole being was rearranged and maybe for the first time put into place.Lily, you continued to perform the play for many years in different settings. Does it remain in your body from production to production?TOMLIN You have a lot of muscle memory from it. When you start working on it again — this doesn’t feel right, I must have moved over here — then it falls into place. It comes back to you very quickly.WAGNER I’ve gotten by as a writer with no muscles. All my life, I’ve never had muscles.TOMLIN She’s at an age where the muscles would come in handy.Would the play change depending on the time and place where you were doing it?TOMLIN In 2001, right after the 9/11 attacks, we opened in San Francisco. Jane used to collect a lot of old Whole Earth Catalogs from her hippie days, and she cited this quote from Whole Earth Catalog. I used to end the production in San Francisco with this same quote because I felt it was so meaningful. It’s anonymous: “Humans are finally the bits of earth that leap up from the planet’s surface, tell what they see to each other, and then die. The sum total of all this seeing and telling is the story of one planet waking up to itself.” We loved that. That’s how we felt at that time.Did you get protective when other people would ask to put on the play? There were solo shows and versions with larger casts playing all the characters.WAGNER We did once we saw one of the productions you just described. It was pretty awful.TOMLIN In the old days, the requests would come in and I would deal with the agent. He’d say it’s a good theater or whatever, and we’d let them do it. Sometimes they would send us a film of what they’d done.WAGNER That’s where it went wrong, I think. [Laughter.] I’m more easily beaten down than she is.TOMLIN That’s why we keep her from the theater. She stays locked in a hotel room and I go, “I’ll be back in three or four hours”WAGNER I’m thinking about us doing it when we had no producer.TOMLIN I was the producer!WAGNER Well, I didn’t know that. I’d send you pages and you’d do them or toss them.TOMLIN Very often in the development process, I’d come in from a night at the theater and I’d talk to Jane about some monologue. I’d say, “If you can just make it — blah blah blah.” Instead of just adjusting some small phrase, she’d just write another monologue. I had like six or seven drafts of some monologues in my head, and I would move sections around, trying to find what the key would be. I was so steeped in it, I was able to just put it out and fly with whatever I could fly with. That’s what an actor really hopes for.“Of course I wanted to do this. The biggest reason to say no is, why would you ever put yourself in a position to be compared to Lily Tomlin?” said Strong, who’s been rehearsing with Silverman at the Shed. Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesLeigh, what got you interested in reviving the play?SILVERMAN When we were in the darkest moments of the pandemic, I was feeling so lost. I have done a lot of solo plays in my career. Most recently I did “Harry Clarke” with Billy Crudup. We were actually supposed to do it again during the pandemic and it was canceled. I had this moment where I thought I never want to do another solo show, ever, ever, ever again. I had a conversation with the Shed and they said, “We want to reopen and we’re looking for the right theatrical experience to do that with. Do you have any ideas?” I said no. And then I had a second call and I said, “I really don’t want do another solo show. But I do think this play should be done, and this is the time.”How was Cecily chosen? How did everyone get comfortable with that choice?SILVERMAN When we were talking about people, very serendipitously, there was the finale of “S.N.L.” last season and I was watching Weekend Update, where Cecily dove headfirst into a giant box of wine and drank her way out. Watching that, I had this moment where I was like, she can do it. She had the combination of the stamina, the skill, the courage and deep, deep empathy. The wild curiosity to just be outrageously funny.STRONG Of course I wanted to do this. The biggest reason to say no is, why would you ever put yourself in a position to be compared to Lily Tomlin? But you hear Leigh talk about it and you start tearing up. It’s like, yes, yes, let’s do this. Just the way the show feels, physically — I get to go through this wonderful catharsis every time we run it.WAGNER Lorne [Michaels, the creator and executive producer of “Saturday Night Live”] has an uncanny ability to understand talent, and he believed in you so much. You wouldn’t have been on “S.N.L.” if you weren’t pretty great.TOMLIN I was totally for it because I wanted Jane’s authorship to stand. So often, I’m thrown into the mix as her collaborator. It’s just not true. Jane is a solitary writer and that’s all there is to it. She writes pages and pages, and if you asked her now to write about this bottle of water, she’d probably come up with 2,000 words.Cecily, you recently performed a Weekend Update character, a clown named Goober who tells jokes about abortion, that felt like she could have fit into this play. Was that piece inspired by your work on this show?STRONG Not consciously writing it. It came from, I’m going to take Ambien and I’m going to write essays to myself every night, or I’m going to remain frustrated and do weird things. Obviously this is something I wanted to get out. I kept posing it to people — I’m thinking it’s about a clown talking about her abortion — and everybody was like, okaaay. I certainly felt scared, and then I felt like I came closer to earning this show. [Speaking to Tomlin] To your bravery, your courage, and what a bombastic, badass thing it is.Jane and Lily, were you ever criticized for your depictions of feminist characters in this play? They are affectionately rendered but still allowed to be laughed at and joked about.WAGNER Oh, yeah. We heard that a little bit.TOMLIN What was there?WAGNER Do you want me to name names?TOMLIN No, you don’t have to name names.WAGNER There are always people that say you shouldn’t. One time somebody insisted we shouldn’t have a monologue that was a half an hour long.TOMLIN Oh, yeah, well, that’s old stuff. You have to make those decisions yourself. Don’t be influenced.WAGNER When I went to a consciousness-raising session — and I only went to one, because I was kind of in shock — I knew that I had to talk about it. People looking at their genitalia and everything like that, there was something satirical there that you could use. I still love the movement and believe in the movement.Cecily and Leigh, how do you begin to tackle a play like this, where one actor is responsible for this much material?SILVERMAN There’s so much that you put down one coat of paint and then you keep going.STRONG I don’t think I’ve ever taken on anything like this, where I’ve been so challenged. How do I put on a coat and I’m trying to sing and I’m trying to quote Buckminster Fuller? It’s so many things but the minute we get one thing right it just feels so good. I feel like my brain is changing a little.Do you allow yourself to have favorite characters within the play?STRONG Something new tickles me every day. Leigh just gave me a big cart of stuff and was like, put it somewhere. What do you do with this thing? It was a great way to enter into Trudy. The other day, I was talking to a plant. I was like, ooh, I like the sound of how that plant shakes.Do you seek notes or input from Lily and Jane? Do they just weigh in when they want to, like the voice of God?STRONG I’ll take anything I can get.WAGNER We like the voice of God concept. [Laughter.]TOMLIN We’re trying to come [in person].WAGNER I have trouble with my leg. Loss of muscle memory, I guess. SILVERMAN We send them video and they’re with us always. There’s a line in the play where Trudy says that she puts some time aside each day to do “awe-robics,” and I will say that so much of working on the play is an exploration of “awe-robics.”WAGNER They’re wonderful, the way you communicate. I think you’re going to do something that actually makes our brains crack. Which could be good for the run of the show. More

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      Cecily Strong to Make New York Theater Debut at the Shed

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      The “S.N.L.” star steps into a role originated by Lily Tomlin, and Claudia Rankine’s “Help” gets its pandemic-delayed world premiere in the new Shed season.Cecily Strong has twice been nominated for an Emmy Award for her standout “Saturday Night Live” impressions that have included Melania Trump, Ariana Grande and Lin-Manuel Miranda.Now she will be playing 12 characters, with no costume changes or props, in her New York theatrical debut — in a role made famous by Lily Tomlin.Strong, who recently won acclaim for her portrayal of a musical-loving backpacker in the Apple TV+ comedy “Schmigadoon!,” will star in a new production at the Shed of Jane Wagner’s one-woman comedy “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.” The production, starting Dec. 21, will be the show’s first New York staging in two decades. It will run through Feb. 6, 2022; Leigh Silverman (“The Lifespan of a Fact,” “Violet”) will direct.In a review of the original 1985 Broadway production, The New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote that the second act — a compressed history of the feminist movement — was “the most genuinely subversive comedy to be produced on Broadway in years,” and praised Tomlin’s “chameleon-like ability to inhabit a wide range of personalities.” The show was adapted into a film, also starring Tomlin, in 1991.The Shed’s 2021-22 season also includes several postponed commissions from 2020, including the world premiere of the author and poet Claudia Rankine’s “Help,” an examination of white male privilege partly based on questions Rankine, who is Black, asked her white male seatmates on airplanes for a New York Times Magazine article. Taibi Magar will direct the production (Mar. 15-Apr. 10, 2022), which follows a middle-aged Black female air traveler on a plane alongside a dozen or so white male characters. Roslyn Ruff (“Fairview”), who starred in two preview performances of the show, is no longer available, so the role will be recast in the coming weeks, said Alex Poots, the artistic director and chief executive of the Shed, at Hudson Yards.“It’s a terrific and shattering piece that I think could not be more relevant now,” he said of the show, which had just two performances before theaters shut down on March 12, 2020.Other highlights of the season include the Berlin-based artist Tomás Saraceno’s exhibition “Particular Matter(s),” a large-scale sensory experience that explores climate change and climate inequity (Feb. 9-April 17, 2022); and a new work by the visual artist, filmmaker and MacArthur fellow Wu Tsang (Apr. 15-17, 2022). Anonymous Club, the creative studio led by the fashion designer Shayne Oliver, will also host three nights of events, titled “Headless: The Glass Ceiling,” with a theme of over-the-top extravagance, or “headlessness,” during New York Fashion Week (Feb. 10-12, 2022).Proof of vaccination will be required for everyone 12 and older for all performances, and everyone age 2 and older must wear a mask.A full season lineup is available at TheShed.org. More