The year is 1857. The locale is a boardinghouse on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It’s a homey dwelling, run by an upstanding middle-aged couple. But behind its unremarkable façade lies a den of activists engaged in the fight for women’s suffrage — in an America where only men of property have the right to vote.

This is the vivid setting of Sandy Rustin’s The Suffragette’s Murder, now having its world premiere at Denver Center Theatre Company. In 2023, the serio-comic play had a public reading in the Colorado New Play Summit and then was picked for the mainstage — an opportunity Rustin relished.

“Denver Center is an amazing place, very much committed to producing new work,” says Rustin, a veteran of Broadway who turned her hand to playwriting while raising her two sons. That career move has been quite a success.

Clue, her crowd-pleasing adaptation of a film based on the perennial whodunit board game, has kept audiences pondering whether Mr. Mustard committed murder in the library with the wrench, or Mrs. Peacock did the deed in the study with a knife. The play has been widely produced among regional theatres and now has an ongoing national tour.

The Suffragette’s Murder also involves a mystery. But the play is a mélange of antic comedy, serious drama and fascinating history too. And it delves into a topic that has been top of mind in recent times for women theater artists — most notably the creators of Suffs, a dark horse, 2024 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical about the long, hard fight to win the vote.

Rustin’s interest in crafting her own play on the subject was triggered by an intriguing assignment. “I was invited by Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota to be a playwright in residence,” she says. For the Suffragist Project, a centennial celebration of the ratification of the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which grants women the right to vote, “the theater commissioned four playwrights to write plays on the theme of suffrage,” explains Rustin. “So first I took myself to the library and did a whole lot of research.”

She became interested in the turbulent, pre-Civil War period in the mid-19^th Century, around the time a landmark conference was held in Seneca Falls, N.Y., with the intention “to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.” The 1848 conclave effectively launched the U.S. movement to obtain the vote for women, a goal not achieved for another half century.

One particular account of life in that era sparked Rustin’s imagination. “I found this wonderful book from 1858, The Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses by Thomas Butler Gunn. There was a chapter on vegetarian boardinghouses. “And in my play vegetarianism became a euphemism for people requiring a safe haven.”

The boardinghouse she concocted is run by Alma and Albert Mayhew, and populated with a diverse set of characters ostensibly sympathetic to the cause — though some have secret agendas of their own.

Says Rustin, “I developed who would be living in the house first and how their stories would intertwine. Then I just got to it. Often, it’s in the actual writing that I discover the plot and find my way to the mystery.”

Folding a mystery into the play was a natural for Rustin. As a child she was a fan of the Encyclopedia Brown mystery books, and while developing her script for Clue, she reveals, “I became a nut for Agatha Christie, her life, and her mysteries.” (Along with her famous whodunit novels, Christie penned plays, like the long running The Mousetrap.)

“I think it’s fun as an audience member to have an activity while you watch a play run the gamut of emotions,” claims Rustin. “In a mystery you become an active participant, because you’re trying to figure out something for yourself. That’s unique to the genre. And it’s a wonderful challenge as a writer, because you have to keep the audience in mind at all times.”

Rustin is also drawn to farce. “I love physical comedy, so the text of this play is deeply tied to the physicality. I have another play, The Cottage, a feminist farce set in 1923 in the British countryside. I thought it would be fun to write one in a similar style in a different period and place, focusing on feminism in a different way.”

While the Mayhews and their cohorts humorously attempt to pull off a pseudo-séance and a bold act of political protest while not blowing their covers, The Suffragette’s Murder also reflects on the lives of people on the fringes of mainstream society.

One boarder is a young Irishman, part of a wave of Irish and other immigrants thronging to America. Also on hand are a spunky young woman, pregnant and unmarried, and her protective mother. And suspicious of everyone in the household is a constable investigating the disappearance of one of inhabitants.

The most unusual resident, for that period, is a Black homosexual man, living as an equal among white residents. He was taken in by the Mayhews after being evicted from Seneca Village, a thriving enclave of African Americans forced to leave their homes when the city cleared the area to construct Central Park.

“There was no support offered to those black residents of Seneca Village who were being displaced,” says Rustin. “I was interested in how that actual event occurred at the same time as the women’s movement appeared, a movement which was focused almost entirely on white women.”

To the still-resonant, overlapping themes of inequality, Rustin has added what she calls “a spoonful of sugar” — humorous repartee, knockabout shenanigans, and a plot with some genuinely surprising twists and turns.

For the world premiere production of The Suffragette’s Murder, Denver Center Theatre Company welcomed Rustin’s direct involvement. “I’ve been happily engaged in selecting a director, talking with the dramaturg,” she reports. “And I’ll be in Denver through the rehearsal process right through to the opening.”

In fact, it’s no mystery that Rustin may be doing some more script tweaking as the play heads into its first run. She says with a laugh, “It’s a work in progress all the way up to opening night.”