On June 7, Bess Wohl’s Liberation won the Tony Award for Best Play. The same spring it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. One of its lead producers is Rachel Sussman, who grew up in Bloomfield Township, ran the performing arts company at Groves High School and competed on the Groves forensics team.
It was her second Tony. The first came in 2023, when the revival of Parade she co-produced was named Best Revival of a Musical. In between she brought a show to Broadway that she had been carrying around since middle school.
Liberation, as it happens, played Broadway’s James Earl Jones Theatre, which is named for another Michigan kid who did forensics.
The idea she had at Berkshire
Sussman first ran into the American women’s suffrage movement in a U.S. history class at Berkshire Middle School, and it never left her. As a sophomore at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, interning at a New York nonprofit, she realized she wanted to be a producer, the person who builds the container for the work and asks who it is for and why now. The suffrage idea came straight back.
At 24 she emailed the songwriter Shaina Taub, a fellow NYU graduate, to say she had a project and thought Taub might be the one to write it. Over dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2014, she asked whether Taub had heard of Alice Paul. Taub had not. Sussman handed her a copy of Doris Stevens’s firsthand account of the suffragists, Jailed for Freedom. Taub’s reply arrived at five the next morning, and the subject line was a single word: yes.
It took ten years. Sussman developed the show as the 2018-19 Prince Fellow at Columbia, where Hal Prince himself gave her notes on an early outline. Suffs premiered at the Public Theater in 2022 and opened on Broadway at the Music Box on April 18, 2024, with Sussman and Jill Furman as lead producers and Hillary Clinton and Malala Yousafzai as co-producers. It earned six Tony nominations. Taub won two, for her book and her score, and thanked Sussman from the stage for knowing the story needed to be told and for choosing her to tell it. The show has since been filmed for PBS’s Great Performances and sent out on a national tour.
That same spring, within about two months, Sussman opened Suffs, married her wife, Emma Galvin, welcomed their son and went to the Tonys. She told the Detroit Jewish News she would not recommend the schedule.
Her other Broadway credits include What the Constitution Means to Me, her first, which was a Tony nominee and a Pulitzer finalist; Alex Edelman’s Just for Us, which earned a Special Tony and became an HBO special; Prima Facie with Jodie Comer; and Gypsy with Audra McDonald. Off-Broadway, The Woodsman won an Obie.
A Groves kid
She was always a theater kid: the Knapsack Players in fourth grade, Rising Stars through middle school, years of competitive dance. At Groves she spent all four years in the Groves Performing Arts Company, played the lead in Thoroughly Modern Millie and served as president of both the company and its Thespian troupe. John Rutherford, the longtime Groves theater teacher, told the school paper that she used to order Playbills to her house, and was thrilled to discover on a New York trip that the theaters hand them out free. When it came time for college she built a slideshow to convince her parents that it had to be New York.
She also did forensics. The Groves Scriptor reported in 2024 that she competed on the Groves team and was part of the first Groves Multiple ever to win the state title. Multiple Interpretation results record the name of the piece rather than the cast, so her name is not on the page, but our archive shows Groves winning Class A Multiple at the 2007 State Finals, while she was a student there, with a piece entered as The Spelling Bee. She also appears in our 2008 State Finals records in Dramatic Interpretation.
In 2025 Sussman co-produced the Off-Broadway revival of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which was extended into 2026.
She has been generous about what Groves gave her. She has said that most people in her industry never had anything like a four-year performing arts company in a public high school, and that she arrived at NYU better prepared than many of her classmates, because Groves had taught her that theater is more than performing.
Bringing it home
She keeps coming back. In 2015 she and the director Katherine Carter founded The MITTEN Lab, short for Michigan Incubator for Theatre Talent Emerging Now, a residency in Bear Lake for early-career theatre artists. She sits on the advisory board of Detroit Public Theatre. In February 2024, two months before Suffs opened, she spent a day at Groves giving talks and taking questions from students.
In New York she teaches producing at Columbia and at NYU, and she co-founded The Business of Broadway to open up how commercial producing actually works to people who were never going to be let in on it. Variety named her one of its ten Broadway names to watch in 2023.
Hal Prince told her that the day after a show opens, a producer should already be in meetings about the next one. She has taken him at his word. Her current slate includes the Suffs tour, Spelling Bee and Penelope at Classic Stage Company.
On record
Our results archive is still being built and has gaps, so this is simply what we hold today.
