One of Bess Wohl’s earliest memories is of her mother taking her to work and dropping her off in a room at the office with wall-to-wall shag carpeting, where she played gender-neutral games with other toddlers. It was the late 1970s in New York City, and the “tot lot” was at Ms. magazine, where Wohl’s mother, Lisa Cronin Wohl, worked as a writer.
Wohl grew up in the womb of the sisterhood around feminist icons and activists who were her mother’s friends. Now 49, she has turned the conversations that played as the background soundtrack of her childhood into a powerful new play about the women’s movement, Liberation, which officially opened at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre, in New York, this past Thursday.
I went to see Liberation in previews with my friend the second-wave feminist writer Honor Moore. Not familiar with Wohl’s work, Honor and I braced ourselves for what we assumed would be the clichéd, cringe-worthy scenes that typify much of our culture’s portrayal of this movement. After all, Honor lived it, and I spent the last five years writing an oral history about it. Boy, were we wrong. During the standing ovation, we both found ourselves weeping along with the rest of the audience and staggering out of the Roundabout in a daze of wonder.
Liberation is Wohl’s 12th play (Grand Horizons was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play in 2020), and the former actress also wrote and directed her first feature film, Baby Ruby, released in 2023. She told me that Liberation contains some biographical elements but is largely a product of her imagination and independent research. Set in an unnamed town in Ohio in 1970, it centers on a group of women who start a consciousness-raising (C.R.) group that will eventually transform their lives.
As part of her research, Wohl interviewed several women who had been part of the same C.R. group for many years starting in 1970. Wohl was struck by the impact that their conversations and sisterhood had on them. One woman told her that the C.R. group literally saved her life, a line that made it into the play. “I learned how deep their friendships were,” Wohl tells me over coffee in Brooklyn Heights, where she lives with her husband and three daughters. “‘Friendship’ isn’t even the right word. They were comrades in arms.”
The cast experienced that same power of sisterhood during rehearsals. “We were doing a show about a C.R. group,” Wohl says. “But then, of course, we became our own C.R. group, and people would tell the most harrowing stories from their own personal lives, on break by the coffee machine, that they just felt moved to share because of what the play called forward.”
The main character, Lizzie (Susannah Flood), is a budding feminist and frustrated journalist who, because she is a woman, is allowed to write only the wedding and obituary notices for the local newspaper. When the play time-travels to the present day, Flood also plays Lizzie’s daughter, who is looking for answers to her current problems by exploring her (now dead) mother’s feminist past. As the feminist slogan proclaims, “The personal is political,” and Liberation’s core question is an exploration of the mother-daughter relationship and the age-old conundrum of how to balance motherhood and personal freedom.
“We were doing a show about a [consciousness-raising] group. But then, of course, we became our own C.R. group, and people would tell the most harrowing stories from their own personal lives.”
“I wanted to write about the fundamental tension in women’s lives and in the feminist movement, of how much do you play by the rules and how much do you burn it all down?,” Wohl says. “What’s the navigation of that personally, and what’s the navigation of that politically? For my mother and for me as well, the tension between being your radical self and being a wife and mother is something that I really wanted to write about. How do those two things coexist? How do love and freedom coexist?”
Wohl started writing the play during the first Trump administration, but she didn’t finish it until after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision. Rehearsals began last fall before the presidential election. “All through September and October, I was thinking, ‘This play is going to feel really different depending on who takes office in January.’ And it has.”
“We’ve had to make the play to suit the moment,” she continues. “Part of the process has been, Let’s make this an act of resistance more than an autopsy or a eulogy. Let’s make this a place where people can come together, feel their feelings and commune, and not just get so depressed that they can’t do anything. The play looks at the ways that individuals can come together and make change happen through community and solidarity. I feel like we are in a moment now when everyone is standing around saying, ‘What do we do?’ So maybe this play is gesturing to some kind of way forward.”
Wohl ends the play with a call to action when Lizzie talks to her dead mother, and asks her, “What is the solution?” Her mother says she doesn’t know, but she encourages Lizzie to pick up where her generation left off: “Now go ahead. You take it from here.”
Lizzie vows to go home and “have the conversation,” the kind of conversation that Wohl believes can create change. “Every story is a brick in the wall,” says Lizzie. Looking at the cast and then the audience, she closes with “Yours is one, too.”
Clara Bingham’s most recent book is The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963–1973
