Review: In ‘Liberation,' the Feminist Revolution Will Be Dramatized

New York Times

21-02-2025

How much would you give to see your mother again as she was in her prime — which is to say, before she had you?
That's one of the be-careful-what-you-wish-for scenarios that Bess Wohl dramatizes in 'Liberation,' her gutting new play about the promise and unfinished business of feminism. All the clenched fists and manifestoes in the world cannot point its second-wave characters, or even their nth-wave daughters, to the sweet spot between love and freedom. Indeed, the play's warning, if not quite its watch cry, is: 'It's almost impossible to have both.'
At any rate, it hasn't been working for the six women who meet on Thursdays at 6 p.m. on the basketball court of a local rec center in a backwater Ohio town in 1970. There, amid banners celebrating local team championships — boys' teams only, of course — they try to make of their random sisterhood a lifeboat to survive the revolution they seek. On the agenda: consciousness raising, problem sharing, political action and self-love prompts. Yes, at one session they all get nervously naked.
But 'Liberation,' which opened on Thursday at the Laura Pels Theater, is neither satire nor agitprop. As directed with cool patience by Whitney White, the better to let its climax sear, and with a cast led by Susannah Flood and Betsy Aidem each at the top of her form, it is gripping and funny and formally daring. In a trick worthy of Escher, and befitting the complexity of the material, it nearly eats the box of its own containment, just as its characters, lacking other emotional sustenance, eat at theirs.
The burden of the trick falls mostly on Flood, whose role is a superimposed, asynchronous portrait of at least two women. The main one is Lizzie, a young journalist stuck on the wedding beat at the local paper, with obits thrown in as a sop to her demand for equality. (In a way, the two beats 'are the same thing,' she says.) Denying that she is the group's leader, though she made the fliers and booked the room, she wants a revolution without having to give up anything to get it and while honoring everyone's contrasting ideologies. History tells us where that approach typically leaves the left.
Take the two Doras, different as could be. The one who is actually Dorothy (Audrey Corsa) is a secretary at a wine and spirits firm working her way up the corporate ladder with the help of her décolletage. The one who is actually Isidora (Irene Sofia Lucio) is an activist from Italy who has seen too little action. (She's also stuck in a green-card marriage.) If the first wants to work the system, the second wants to blow it up, or at least to participate meaningfully in a local version of the national Women's Strike for Equality in August, 1970.
The rest of the lifeboat crew are likewise carefully particularized to create lines of possible connection and tangles of possible conflict. Susan (Adina Verson) all but announces that she's a lesbian (her ambition is to ride naked on a Harley), but she's not the only one who does not feel fully welcome under the umbrella of '70s feminism. In that, she is trumped by Celeste (Kristolyn Lloyd), the only Black woman in the group. A cautious, intense intellectual, she has returned unhappily to Ohio to care for her dying mother, a responsibility that threatens to sink her.
The burdens of motherhood loom large among these women, even if only the oldest, Margie, has children. (In Aidem's performance, Margie is a warm, tough cookie, with a husband she imagines stabbing to death.) But Wohl's manipulations of structure undo the premise. Flood plays not just Lizzie in the '70s but also Lizzie's daughter in the present tense, a woman now approaching 50 who, not unlike the playwright herself, finds herself facing the same problems that the older cohort were supposed to solve years ago.
Why didn't they?
The adolescent tetchiness of that question, with its implication that '70s feminists did not do enough to spare their literal and spiritual daughters from sexism, nags at 'Liberation' until, in a series of wonderful surprises, it finally fights back. Unraveling in ways reminiscent of Lisa Kron's 'Well' and Heidi Schreck's 'What the Constitution Means to Me,' it forces a confrontation between Flood and Aidem that exists outside of time and feels frankly, bravely autobiographical. I won't describe it further except to repeat: Be careful what you wish for.
Wohl has prepared us for this metatheatrical moment from the start. It's Lizzie's daughter who welcomes us to the theater, nattering not quite randomly about the running time. ('Surely you've noticed all of those six-hour, eight-hour, ten-hour plays are by men with no children?' she says. 'A woman with children would never.') And as the story unfolds, several other characters (including two played by Kayla Davion) switch their eras or skins. The appearance of the actor Charlie Thurston at the first-act curtain is not perhaps so much of a surprise, because he's in the cast list, but his arrival, doing impressive layups, significantly changes the atmosphere, even before we know who he is.
White's staging for the Roundabout Theater Company somehow keeps us on the useful edge of confusions like that without pushing us over. She explains neither less nor more than she needs to with the gymnasium set (by David Zinn), the institutional lighting (by Cha See) and the intimate sound (by Palmer Hefferan). On the other hand, she lets Qween Jean (costumes) and Nikiya Mathis (wigs and hair) have a field day with the period style. You may never look at sweater dresses and plaid coordinates the same way again.
Nor at marriage. The blithe comfort or even disinterest that many children feel about their parents' marital happiness does not survive Wohl's critique of it here. In a way, 'Liberation' feels like a second and far more successful shot at the theme first announced in her play 'Grand Horizons,' seen on Broadway in 2020. In that deliberately overbright sitcom, a woman approaching 80 announces, to her sons' horror, that she wants a divorce from their father. But the horror is played for mere humor. Feeling that his parents are too old for such nonsense, one son gets a big laugh whining: 'How much else even is there?'
'Liberation' shows us how much. A work of great ambition that seems to have grown its craft for the purpose, it asks us to keep growing too, even after our mothers can no longer tell us, now that we are finally mature enough to care, who they were.