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 to her may sound a bit like the same thing—has organized a feminist consciousness-raising group, where she and five other women from different walks of life gather weekly to air their experiences and work toward a less frustrating future. Their discussions are wide-ranging and, for the most part, mutually empowering; in a bravura scene at the start of Act Two, they strip nude to expose their bodies as well as their selves. (For this reason, audience members’ phones must be powered off and locked in Yondr pouches, which has the bonus benefit of curtailing noisy interruptions.)
Liberation | Photograph: Courtesy Little Fang
The oldest member of the group is Margie (Betsy Aidem), a cigarette-voiced housewife with a layabout husband. “I’m here because I need things to get me out of the house so I don't stab him to death,” she says. “I realize that sounds like a joke. It's not a joke.” The youngest is Susan (Adina Verson), a.k.a. Susie Hurricane, a radical lesbian with a sensitive underbelly. Celeste (Kristolyn Lloyd) is a serious and wary Black academic who has returned from New York City to tend to her sick mother. Isadora (Irene Sofia Lucio) is a brash and independent-minded Sicilian filmmaker trapped in a Green Card marriage; Dora (Audrey Corsa) is a pretty young blonde who can’t get her bosses to take her seriously. The dramatis personae is completed by two characters from beyond the group: Joanne (Kayla Davion), a mother of four who is skeptical of the feminist project; and Bill (Charlie Thurston), a kind and handsome lawyer who represents, for Lizzie, a vexing lure toward patriarchal compliance. (Much of the handwringing in this play includes fiddling with a wedding ring.)
Liberation | Photograph: Courtesy Little Fang
Wohl situates these meetings within a larger conversation: one between women today and the generations of women that came before them. Liberation is narrated in the present by Lizzie’s daughter, a playwright in the process of rethinking her relationship with her late mother. (“I love my mom, but for most of my life—for reasons I won’t get into right now—becoming my mom was like my biggest nightmare,” she tells us.) Wohl calls Liberation “a memory play about things I don’t remember,” which cuts a lot of ways. The narrator cannot, of course, remember things that happened before she was born, though in the course of writing her play about them—i.e. Liberation itself—she interviews surviving members of her mother’s CR group. And the journey of this play involves, in many ways, reminding herself of a history that she and many other women in her cohort seem to have forgotten. “Why does it feel somehow like it’s all slipping away?” she asks. “And how do we get it back?”
Liberation | Photograph: Courtesy Little Fang
While the narrator seems very much a stand-in for Wohl herself, and shares some of her biography, Liberation is primarily a work of fiction; it’s a testament to the quality of the writing that it often seems otherwise. But as the play goes on, it becomes increasingly self-referential and Pirandellian; the conversation between present and past becomes literalized as the narrator-playwright interacts with her own characters. At the same time, Liberation reflects an internal conversation between the playwright and herself as she wrestles with how to incorporate criticism of second-wave feminism as overly focused on middle-class white women. And in the play’s final moments, in an envoi somewhere between a blessing and a challenge, Wohl’s narrator throws the conversation out to the audience.
Liberation | Photograph: Courtesy Little Fang
Liberation wants to get you talking, and it gives you plenty to talk about. Whitney White’s direction elicits a triumph of ensemble acting whose equipoise is a perfect realization of the play’s own themes. The actors work so well together, and so unselfishly, that it seems absurd to single any of them out. But Flood deserves extra praise for meeting the huge demands of a part that demands deep human connection from a figure in perpetual metatheatrical flux. And she gets exquisite assistance at the play’s emotional climax from Aidem, a longtime local stage VIP—she played the juicy role of Shelby in Steel Magnolias back in 1987—who keeps proving her considerable mettle. The characters are well served indeed by Qween Jean’s vivid period costumes (especially Lucio’s Isadora, a vision in leather and kickass boots) and Nikiya Mathis’s hair and wig design.
Liberation | Photograph: Courtesy Little Fang
Liberation is a show for the current moment; it's this generation's answer to Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles. “Every story was another brick in the wall,” says one character about the bygone CR sisterhood. “Every brick was an experience.” But what is the wall here? Wohl’s bricks are very different from, say, the bricks in the wall imagined by Pink Floyd. These are the bricks of a fortification, or perhaps of a room of one’s own; perhaps a community center, better than a high school gym, where people can gather to hear different perspectives; maybe a sturdy platform for voices to make themselves heard, in all their contradictions; maybe, even, a theater.
Liberation. James Earl Jones Theatre (Broadway). By Bess Wohl. Directed by Whitney White. With Susannah Flood, Betsy Aidem, Kristolyn Lloyd, Irene Sofia Lucio, Audrey Corsa, Adina Verson, Kayla Davion, Charlie Thurston. Running time: 2hrs 25mins. One intermission.
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Liberation | Photograph: Courtesy Little Fang
