Only a few weeks into the New Year, and 2025 has already delivered its first great new play. That sentence is written in the same blunt spirit of the sobering, funny, provocative and totally engaging play that is Bess Wohl’s “Liberation,” which had its world premiere Thursday at Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre.
As playwrights go, Wohl doesn’t mess around. At the top of the evening, she brings on stage a narrator who is even more direct and efficient when it comes to telling a story than the Stage Manager in “Our Town.” She is a young woman named Lizzie, whose mother (also named Lizzie) founded a women’s group in the year 1970. Women’s Lib? Consciousness raising? Even Lizzie Sr. wasn’t quite sure what these half dozen women hoped to achieve by meeting once a week and talking about their lives.
Lizzie Jr. first appears in a school gymnasium — David Zinn’s set design loads the space with references to boys’ sports — but like Thornton Wilder’s narrator, she addresses a real audience in a real theater to tell us right off the bat what’s about to happen. Warning us that it will be a longer evening than usual — two and a half hours with intermission — she references the play’s subtitle, “A Memory Play About Things I Don’t Remember.” Lizzie Jr. will lead an inquiry into what her mother’s generation achieved in making Roe v. Wade the law of the land, and, equally important, as this daughter asks, “Why does it feel somehow like it’s all slipping away? And how do we get it back?”
At the performance I attended, the audience at the Pels Theatre was immediately hooked.
Playing both daughter and mother, Susannah Flood has the ability of figuratively spreading out her arms to embrace that entire audience. Her warmth and immediate familiarity is a wonderful way to begin an awesome night in the theater. She has a story to tell, and this narrator appears to be as much Flood the actor as she is at times both Lizzie and her daughter. The three of them are knitted together seamlessly — except when Flood/Lizzie calls on other actors to play the mother Lizzie.
No other medium — not film, not a novel — could handle this symbiosis with such apparent ease. When these amazing metamorphoses take place, there are sometimes subtle changes in Cha See’s lighting and Palmer Hefferan’s sound design. Wohl is so skillful in telling this free-floating story that even those subtle clues are not always necessary under Wendy White’s taut direction.
For the 1970s, there are some pretty radical ideas expressed in this women’s group. One lesbian (Adina Verson) in the group thinks that child birth is the root of all female oppression and the government should start building artificial wombs immediately. If men got pregnant, there would already be such contraptions on every drug store shelf in the country. The oldest woman in the group (Betsy Aidem) is much less scientific in her approach to the opposite sex. She simply wants to kill her husband.
Other women run other gamuts. An Italian immigrant (Irene Sofia Lucio) makes it clear her marriage is one of strict convenience: She needed and got a green card. And one young woman (Audrey Corsa) has brought some big needles and yarn to the meeting because she thought it was a knitting-group. Most of the performances match Flood’s level of naturalism; only Lucio and Verson sometimes overplay their characters.
Wohl brings one male actor (Charlie Thurston) on stage, but delays his entrance until near the end of the first act. He’s Lizzie Jr.’s father, and the big shocker in Act 2 is that he turns out to be a pretty nice guy when it comes to proposing marriage to Lizzie.
Wohl fills “Liberation” with all sorts of wonderful side trips, such as the snap critique by one woman of David Mamet’s play “Oleanna.” But through it all, the female characters are never presented as a bunch of victims. In fact, they gradually emerge as a rather privileged group that’s not always in touch with the demands made on most people of their sex. No one in this group has children or is currently raising any. As one occasional visitor (Kayla Davion) to the gymnasium makes clear, the group has decided to meet at a time — 6 p.m. — when most women are at home feeding their family and making sure the kids do their homework. This lapse of judgment is most starkly expressed in a tête-à-tête between this mother of four and the other character of color (Kristolyn Lloyd), who enjoy a much-needed smoke outside the gaze of the white majority.
A couple of other big controversies surface in the second act, which, for the purposes of this review, should not be aired here. In most circumstances today, these episodes would be not consciousness-shaking, but back in 1970 within the community of these women, they land as shockers in “Liberation.”
In the second sentence of this review, I used a lot of adjectives to describe “Liberation.” The word “conservative” could be added to that list. Wohl’s play, in the end, is much more about the “slipping away” than it is the getting “it back.” The sexes may be more hard-wired than any character on this stage wants to admit.
