Liberation
Broadway review by Adam Feldman
Theater, they say, is the fabulous invalid, regaling visitors with tales of past glory as it sinks into its deathbed; conversation, they say, is another dying art. But don’t tell that to Bess Wohl’s Liberation, which has just moved to Broadway, with its exceptional cast intact, after a much-discussed run at the Roundabout earlier this year. A searching and revealing drama about the achievements and limits of 1970s feminism, Liberation weaves different kinds of conversation into a multilayered narrative—and, in doing so, serendipitously restores the very word conversation to its roots. As an adjective or noun, converse denotes opposition or reversal. As a verb, however, it stems from the Latin term conversare, which means “turning together.” In other words: Conversation may involve disagreement—and in Liberation, it often does—but it is not at its core adversarial. It’s literally about sharing a revolution.
Liberation | Photograph: Courtesy Little Fang
The revolution in question here is second-wave feminism, the so-called “women’s lib” movement of the 1960s and 1970s that aimed to continue the advances toward sexual equality that had come earlier in the century. The play’s first level of conversation takes place over a period of years in the early 1970s in a smelly high school gym somewhere in the midwest. Lizzie (Susannah Flood)—a budding journalist whose editor won’t let her write anything but wedding announcements and obituaries, which...