In Broadway’s Liberation, Bess Wohl Shines a Light on 1970s Feminists
The celebrated playwright on why now is the right moment to look back at second-wave feminism.
Playwright Bess Wohl (center) with cast member Audrey Corsa and stage manager Andie Burns at the first rehearsal for the Broadway production of Liberation.
Photographer: Valerie TerranovaBess Wohl has been working on a play about the 1970s feminist movement for the better part of 15 years, but it wasn’t until after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, transforming the abortion-rights fight, that she finally finished a draft of Liberation. “I had this play in my consciousness for a long time,” she says. “But this version of the play came right after Roe had been overturned and added more fuel to the fire of why I wanted to write it.”
Liberation, which opened on Broadway yesterday at the James Earl Jones Theatre, is a funny and poignant exploration of second-wave feminism through the lens of one woman’s relationship with her mother. Lizzie, played by Susannah Flood, tries to reconcile the woman she knew, a doting wife and mother, with her mother’s past as a restless feminist in Ohio. In the play, Flood also plays her mother as a young woman, a dissatisfied journalist stuck on the wedding and obit beat—the two are basically the same thing, she jokes—while being a member of a women’s “consciousness-raising group” that meets in a high school gym in the early ’70s. There, on a basketball court, a group of six women from different walks of life meet to talk about everything from body image and unfair workplaces to unequal marriages and the future they see for themselves in America.