Liberation offers a timely exploration of feminism, generational divides, and the persistent struggle for women’s rights, showing how much has changed—and yet how much remains the same.
Art evolves through a contemporary lens. The same photograph, film or musical that would not have raised eyebrows in the 1950s might be taboo today. And now, we freely embrace discussions of topics that my grandmother would never have uttered a word of in public. So, it is no surprise that Bess Wohl’s Liberation, a play centering on a women’s liberation group in 1970s Ohio, lands differently today than it would have years ago. However, Wohl’s work has uniquely transformed throughout time, so much so that its meaning has changed drastically from even a year ago.
In Liberation, running off-Broadway through April 6, the narrator—who is now an adult reporter with children of her own—looks back at her mother’s involvement in a women’s awareness group. She cannot conceive the woman who “sewed the costumes for every school play and cooked every family dinner and did all the dishes and took [her] to every piano lesson and sat through it and never, ever missed a recital” as being “radical.” The production also goes back and forth in time. The narrator plays both herself in the present day, interviewing members of the group in the present day, and her now-deceased mother in the 1970s.
Liberation examines feminism in both a personal and political way. Characters wrestle with everyday problems such as striving to be seen as equal to their male counterparts, expressing their sexual orientation publically, and even contemplating whether it is okay to flaunt their breasts to get ahead.
Additionally, they present broader questions: How do you affect change? Who fits within the movement? Who speaks for it? These questions are amplified through an inter-generational lens, as the narrator struggles to come to terms with her mother’s antiquated decisions, despite being a part of a progressive movement.
Wohl insists the play is not autobiographical, and that she does not see the narrator as a stand-in for herself. Nevertheless, she’s admitted there are some similarities. The mother in the piece goes to work at Ms., just as Wohl’s own mother did (the magazine is mentioned repeatedly during the play). On a more thematic level, the characters grapple with a relatable quagmire to many women, including Wohl: balancing love and freedom.
All of the conversations in the play were ones I still have with my friends.
Rachel McBride, 32, New York
Wohl’s previous plays have dealt with gender imbalances. In Continuity, she wrote about a female director trying to make her mark in a male-dominated industry. In Grand Horizons (Wohl’s sole Broadway credit), a wife decides she wants a divorce after 50 years of marriage.
However, while it is predominantly set in the 1970s, Liberation feels timelier than either of those. The recent election was indubitably fueled by a “gender war” of sorts, and now, traditional gender roles have taken priority in this country.
Wohl began writing the play during the last Trump administration, but this world premiere production was announced during the Biden years. Sitting in the theater, I wondered whether certain lines had been changed since the election because of how pertinent they felt.
One of the women in the group reveals she voted for Nixon, much to the shock of the others. She defends her decision, claiming, “I was pissed and fed up with this, this, this groovy meaningless liberal bullshit—I mean McGovern wasn’t even pro-choice for so many years—for years and years we wasted our time begging for crumbs—I have to do something, I have to change something, this is my vote. My vote. My choice. Maybe we blow it up and people get angry enough for real change.” According to Wohl, those lines were always there, perhaps owing to the rhetoric surrounding the first Donald Trump election.
A few other lines though, including one about how “recently it’s been feeling like things might be going in the wrong direction,” could very well have been added to properly address these times.
The play ends with a call to action: a command to carry the movement forward. At the performance I attended, it also ended with audience members in tears. A mother apologized to her daughter for not doing a better job with her own consciousness-raising circles. Women were shaking their heads and discussing the failed presidential bids of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris or the latest sexist thing they heard at work. The play was able to create community amongst theatre-goers, strangers to one another, because it tugged at a commonly shared, and feared, life experience for them.
“I cannot believe how little has changed in 50 years,” Rachel McBride, a 32-year-old recent New York transplant from Georgia, said while wiping her eyes. “All of the conversations in the play were ones I still have with my friends.”
If Harris had won, Liberation would have reminded us of all the progress that was made by women like those depicted. Now it reminds us how far there still is to go.
