Though not listed in the program, Liberation, an inventive and resonant new play by Bess Wohl, possesses a subtitle: A Memory Play About Things I Don’t Remember. The line presumably refers to the personal nature of the show, based in part on the life of Wohl’s mother, Lisa Cronin Wohl, who worked for Ms Magazine in New York during Wohl’s early years, but it also applies to the conversations at hand, within a women’s lib group in small-town Ohio, 1970. On the basketball court of a local rec center, six women hit the blinkered beats of second-wave feminism – workplace inequalities, consciousness raising, The Feminine Mystique – that many in the audience will only know secondhand, through family histories, re-creations like FX’s superb series Mrs America or inherited cultural shorthand. I, like Wohl – like anyone born after Roe – have only inherited memories of this stage in the fight for sex and gender equality.
There’s often a tone of light derision applied to second-wave feminism, whose white, upper-middle class limitations were glaring even if its aims were noble, albeit tragically fragile. Lizzie, an adult woman of our times, seems to know this. She’s played, by Susannah Flood, as anxious, apologetic, eager to over-explain; she addresses the audience first as a peer, with the lights up, the required sealing of phones acknowledged, the fourth wall unbuilt. Perhaps, to get a restless crowd of New Yorkers to sit for two and a half hours with this circle in Ohio, one must lure them slowly through the back door of theater – here, a resurrection of the group in which Lizzie plays both herself, its chronicler, and her late mother, its founder – with slowly solidifying artifice and the eternally alluring question of who our parents were before us. The mother, according to the daughter, sewed the costumes for every school play, made every family dinner and did all the dishes – how could she have ever been radical?
Liberation, which premiered off-Broadway earlier this year, is a welcome original play on Broadway that relies not on marquee Hollywood names for buzz but a slate of strong performances, which elevate a first act that seems, like its narrator, a bit too eager to give the answer. Each member of the group gets a capital-M monologue to introduce herself and her archetype: Lizzie, the founder, a local journalist stymied at work who claims to not lead this non-hierarchal group (she does); Margie (Betsy Aidem), an older, frustrated housewife ruing thankless years of labor; Celeste (Kristolyn Lloyd), a radical Black lesbian returned home to care for her ailing mother; Susan (Adina Verson), an androgynous, Marxist rebel living out of her car; Isidora (standout Irene Sofia Lucio), a fiery working-class Italian immigrant stuck in a green-card marriage; and Dora (Audrey Corsa), a girlish secretary drawn to the cause by one too many “sweetheart” diminishments at work.
Liberation, directed by Whitney White, initially lulls the audience into the personal and political binds of living history; the first act, though choreographed so that no one character spends too much time sitting in those plastic rec room chairs (scenic design by David Zinn), occasionally evokes a museum exhibit, its revelations clipped and neat and precisely packaged, even as evergreen divisions emerge within the group: talk versus action, practicality versus principle, collective aim versus personal safety or success.
Any listlessness, however, is expelled by the far superior second act, which boldly opens with a meeting in the nude (full bush, hence no phones), inspired by the real efforts of 70s consciousness groups. (Intimacy director Kelsey Rainwater coordinates a fast-settling normalcy to the proceeding.) The play’s second half unravels the frayed distinctions between then and now, memory and reality, skirting the line of self-awareness without tipping fully into self-importance. (It helps that it’s frequently quite funny, even biting.)
That it works owes in large part to Joanne (Kayla Davion), a Black mother keenly attuned to the limitations of a group that meets at 6pm on a school night – she derides that nudity moment as child-free woman’s indulgent opportunity to “look at our pussies in the mirror”. Also a standby in Lizzie’s story, she’s a canny – perhaps too canny? – device through which to check the intersectional failures of both the group and the show itself, whom Davion nevertheless imbues with gravitational pull. A late-stage showdown between her and Celeste, over just how much the group will stand for Black women, is both a show highpoint, and a tantalizing glimpse into a different story.
But Lizzie and her daughter, a diaphanous distinction that Flood manages seamlessly, are the center of this ultimately searing solar system; the climax for this particular story finds the group sundered by all kinds of frustrations, differences and disappointments, chief among them Lizzie’s engagement to Bill (Charlie Thurston), an irresistibly handsome man who wants to move to New York. The ensuing row over this submission to tradition – is there freedom in romantic love? Does such a thing exist in marriage to a man? – feels particularly pointed in this era of so-called heterofatalism.
The play offers no concrete answers; one’s personal politics and choices remain, as ever, a thicket of contradictions. Liberation finds, in that, an immutable and potent grief – for the costs of our failings, for all that’s been lost, for the questions we thought too late to ask. But that doesn’t mean, as this provocative play suggests, that we shouldn’t still ask them.
