Tonight we went to see Hooligans and Convicts at the Winnipesaukee Playhouse. It’s a musical play commissioned by the theater for the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, with the debut delayed one more year due to the pandemic. The play is a historical review, with a modern teenager as the framing mechanism for with seven actresses and actors taking on a multitude of roles. Earnest and didactic at times, I think the play benefits from looking at the relationships between leaders, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass. The play also crosses the pond to look at the militant suffrage movement in the U.K. and leader Emmeline Pankhurst. Pankhurst gives the play its name based on the terms of derision a magistrate threw at her. Those [historical figures] included goes beyond some of the bigger names to include a mix of movement members, including African American women whose organization were relegated to the back of the march in support of the 19th amendment.
My favorite performance was from Rebecca Tucker who played both Anthony and Pankhurst, both quite juicy roles of charismatic speakers who brought them alive. Our whole group enjoyed it, learned a few things, and left with some things to think about. In particular, one theme that stood out to me was the role of children and pregnancy in the movement that often isn’t given the same level of attention in histories of civil rights struggles.
[Edits: Some small fixes for clarity and addition of pictures.]