“Liberation,” a play by Bess Wohl that explores second-wave feminism and its discontents, is coming to Broadway.
The drama had a well-received world premiere last winter at the Roundabout Theater Company’s Off Broadway space, the Laura Pels Theater, and that production is now set to open on Oct. 28 at the James Earl Jones Theater. The show’s 14-week limited run will begin with previews on Oct. 8. Whitney White will again direct; the cast and the rest of the creative team have yet to be announced. The show’s producers are Daryl Roth, Eva Price, Rachel Sussman and Jenny Gersten.
Wohl, who made her Broadway debut with the 2020 comedy “Grand Horizons,” was inspired in part by the life of her mother, Lisa Cronin Wohl, a writer who had worked for Ms. Magazine when Wohl was young.
“I’ve had this play in my mind and in my soul and in my heart for a very long time,” Wohl said in an interview on Wednesday. Blending memory, fact and fiction, the play takes place mostly in the 1970s, at the rec center meetings of an Ohio women’s group. But it also shows how the work of the movement continues, politically and very, very personally, into the present.
Jesse Green, reviewing the show in The New York Times, described “Liberation” as a gutting, inventive play. “It is gripping and funny and formally daring,” he wrote. “In a trick worthy of Escher, and befitting the complexity of the material, it nearly eats the box of its own containment, just as its characters, lacking other emotional sustenance, eat at theirs.”
“Liberation” won an Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding new Off Broadway play and Drama Desk and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards for its ensemble. At one point, most members of that ensemble perform a nude scene, inspired by the efforts of real 1970s consciousness-raising groups, which meant that Off Broadway, audience members were asked to keep their phones in sealed pouches for the duration of the show.
Wohl, who is also known for “Small Mouth Sounds” and “Camp Siegfried,” had worried how an audience would respond to this play, her most personal. But she remembered something her own mother had told her: Feel the fear and do it anyway. “My desire to share this story and my hope that it would resonate with other people ultimately was greater than my fear,” she said. “The incredibly gratifying thing has been to see that people have met the play so beautifully.”
She’s also looking forward to welcoming the wider audience that a Broadway run can attract. “As much as it’s about certain concerns of the women’s liberation movement and feminism in particular, both its incredible achievements and also its more complicated and problematic aspects, the basic premise that everyone should be treated with dignity, respect, equality and humanity doesn’t seem controversial to me,” she said.
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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