Theater Review: Liberation

Bess Wohl’s new drama about a small-town 1970 women’s-lib group “takes an old form and shakes it like a freshly laundered sheet in the breeze,” said Sara Holdren in NYMag.com. A memory play, Liberation is also “the best play I’ve seen this season,” because it “balances the intensely personal and the broadly civic, the ethical and the theatrical, with extraordinary rigor and grace.”

Susannah Flood occupies the crucial roles of both a narrator in our present and Lizzie, a character inspired by Wohl’s mother, who organized the consciousness-raising group around the time of the national Women’s Strike for Equality. The action all takes place on the basketball court of an Ohio rec center, where Lizzie is joined by five other group participants who “proceed to summon and surf a growing wave of charisma, camaraderie, tenderness, and tension.” But we’re also forever aware that this is a story being told by Flood’s narrator, a stand-in for Wohl who is able to regularly break into the 1970 scene and converse with the other characters.

“Gripping and funny and formally daring,” Liberation examines the unfinished business of feminism for its own purposes, said Jesse Green in The New York Times. The group shows us a range of discontent. Empty nester Margie (Betsy Aidem) says she is on the verge of stabbing her husband. Susan (Adina Verson) yearns to ride naked on a Harley, apparently with a girlfriend nestled behind her. Celeste (Kristolyn Lloyd), the only Black woman, is bitter about having had to return home to care for her dying mother. For a while, the narrator is questioning, from a distance of five decades, why these women didn’t achieve more. But “in a series of wonderful surprises,” the ’70s cohort finally fights back.

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Wohl’s sharp wit “scrapes away the reverential attitude that you might expect from a play about the nascent women’s movement,” said Charles Isherwood in The Wall Street Journal. But “there is little the director, Whitney White, can do to tame the play’s unruly structure,” particularly in a first act that burdens the excellent cast with “windy stretches of monologue and dialogue.” That flaw might be hardwired into the subject matter. “After all, you probably cannot raise your consciousness or anyone else’s without making your voice heard, repeatedly and at length.”