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It took Bess Wohl a long time to write what would eventually become Liberation, her acclaimed play which opened last week on Broadway. After all, she started thinking about making something about the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s about 20 years ago.
“I was trying to crack it really not for political reasons, but for personal reasons, for most of my writing life,” she says in a recent Zoom call.
Now Liberation exists in a world that has, in many ways, shockingly regressed with the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the rise of “tradwife culture.” The circumstances make the work feel more urgent than ever. Still, the production doesn’t profess to explain where we are now. Instead, it’s a deeply inquisitive look at how we got here.
The play opens with a narrator (Susannah Flood) directly addressing the crowd, explaining that she is going to tell the story of her mother, Lizzie (also played by Flood), who started a consciousness raising group in an Ohio rec center basement. Director Whitney White invites us into that room and we meet the women who have gathered—among them, a housewife who has grown disillusioned with her life (Betsy Aidem); a woman caring for her ailing mother while writing a book on radical feminism (Kristolyn Lloyd); an Italian immigrant in a green card marriage (Irene Sofia Lucio). But Flood often steps out of the action to comment on it and bring us into the present, along the way eliciting questions that range from “what went wrong?” to “is marriage an act of betrayal?”
The ways in which Liberation moves through time and breaks from theatrical convention, including by having its actors play multiple roles, make it a sort of magic trick that turns cathartic, not just for the characters on stage, but for the audience. Speaking with TIME, Wohl discussed how she finally nailed down the narrative and what she makes of the intimate conversations the play is sparking.
TIME: What made you want to write this?
Wohl: Because my mom worked at…
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