INTERVIEW: ‘Hamilton’ alumna Ari Afsar honors legacy of suffrage activist in ‘Jeannette’
Photo: Ari Afsar, alumna of Hamilton and a singer-songwriter, will present a concert version of her new musical, Jeannette, at SubCulture in New York City. Photo courtesy of the artist / Provided by Press Play with permission.
The story of Jeannette Rankin is one to remember and learn from, yet many people have never heard of the suffrage activist who was the first woman elected to the United States Congress. Ari Afsar, an actor and singer-songwriter, hopes to change that with her new musical Jeannette.
Songs from Afsar’s show will be performed in a concert format at a special one-night-only event Monday, July 29 at SubCulture in New York City. The song cycle will feature the singing talents of Afsar, Joshua Henry, Lexi Lawson and Jessica Vosk.
“I originated the Chicago production of Hamilton, and a month after we opened, the election happened,” Afsar said of the presidential election. “It kind of changed the world, obviously, and I realized that selfishly I needed to … surround myself with badass women leaders.”
To achieve that goal, Afsar became extremely involved in many civic-minded organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Women’s March and United State of Women.
“It just felt wrong to do this beautiful piece [Hamilton] and then go back to my 44th-floor high-rise apartment, and I needed to get involved,” she said. “So I was able to meet such an incredible community of women leaders through these beautiful organizations, and then I also realized how can we grow as a society and as a movement if we actually don’t know who our founding mothers are. And so I literally did a Google search of who the first woman elected into Congress was and was completely flabbergasted by the fact that she was in Congress four years before a woman could vote on a federal level, by the fact that she was the first and the last woman from Montana to be in Congress.”
Rankin, the oldest daughter of a schoolteacher and rancher, was first elected in 1916 to the U.S. Congress. Prior to her time in Congress, she was a well-known suffragist and helped several states expand voting rights for women.
“I’m like, this is insane,” Afsar remembers. “How has she literally been written out of history? And so I literally asked all my constituents. I’m like, have you heard of this woman? Have you heard of this woman? What do you think of her? … I’m first and foremost a songwriter, so I wrote a concept album about Jeannette Rankin because that’s clearly what you do. And I wrote all of these songs and started performing them, so at the Women’s March I performed one of the songs. I opened for Michelle Obama at the United State of Women, and all of these songs are about this unspoken woman, Jeannette Rankin.”
Afsar, whose debut EP is called Somewhere I Thought I’d Be, eventually was talking with friends about the songs, and it was mentioned that she should meet Lauren M. Gunderson, a playwright of such works as I and You and Parts They Call Deep. Afsar agreed to meet and even sent over the songs before their get-together.
“This supposed-to-be 15-minute call turned into an hour and a half,” she said. “And I talked to her, and I’m like, ‘I think this is a TV show with music.’ By the end of the conversation, she was like, ‘Absolutely not. We are writing a musical, and I’m helping you turn this concept album into a musical.’ And so that was about a year and a half / two years ago.”
Gunderson is now credited as the book writer for Jeannette, and the show was recently selected by the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center for a two-week developmental workshop during the National Music Theatre Conference. That experience has prepared Afsar and the company for this special concert.
“The concert is just mainly focusing on the songs, so the music is pop rock,” she said. “You’re getting a glimpse and a sense of who Jeannette is, but mainly focusing on the music and essentially attempting this pop rock concert about Jeanette Rankin.”
Some of the cast members have worked with Afsar before. Henry, for example, shared a stage with Afsar in Chicago’s Hamilton. Lawson and Afsar both performed the role of Eliza in Hamilton, with Afsar in Chicago and Lawson on Broadway.
These actors will present the material, which for the audience should feel like a wonderful coming together of 1916 and 2019. That’s the idea at least because Afsar and Gunderson want the theatergoers to see the connections between the past and present.
“We definitely blur the lines of 2019 and 1916 a lot,” Afsar said. “The music is very contemporary, the dialogue is very contemporary, and the reality is the issues are very similar. And so with that I think is really the intention of both Lauren and I is to blur those lines, and there are times in which we actually do jump ahead to 2019 and talk about what’s happening right now. There are moments which are uncomfortable because the similarities are quite baffling.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
A concert version of Jeannette, a new musical by Ari Afsar and Lauren M. Gunderson, will be presented Monday, July 29 at SubCulture in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
