When Bess Wohl’s Liberation began performances off-Broadway at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre earlier this year, it was just after Trump’s second inauguration. The time-hopping memory play—which looks at a multigenerational group of second-wave feminists through a world-weary modern-day lens—registered as capital-I Important. Though not in a didactic, dullsville way. In a Heidi Chronicles kind of way.
Now, as it opens on Broadway—while women are losing their rights not to mention their voices—Liberation, directed by Whitney White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding), feels eerily prescient, as if Wohl possessed some sort of crystal ball.
[Read Roma Torre’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Lizzie (Susannah Flood), the play’s present-day narrator and stand-in for Wohl, is as flummoxed as the rest of us: “I mean, look around, look, look at what’s happening in the world right now, what is happening, and can someone please explain it to me and how do I explain it to my children….” Her search for answers takes us back to the 1970s, where, in the basement of an Ohio rec center, her mother and a few strangers–turned–fast friends started their own revolution.
“The general concept is—if we raise our consciousness, increase our understanding of the oppression and the sources of oppression in our own lives— personally—this is how we change the world, we raise our consciousness, we change the world,” says Lizzie, taking on the role of her mom. Turning back to the audience, she acknowledges the pretentiousness of the aforementioned remark: “I know, but it was the ’70s.” Your tolerance for fourth-wall-breaking might vary, but it’s a very smart tactic on Wohl’s part; not only does it bring the audience in, but it allows for those much-needed moments of comic relief amid super-tense scenes.
In addition to Lizzie’s mom—a journalist who covered obituaries and weddings (“which in a way are the same thing,” she jokes)—the CR group includes housewife Margie (Prayer for the French Republic’s Betsy Aidem, drily hilarious and wonderfully moving), whose kids are grown and husband is retired. “And so I’m really, I’m here because I need things to get me out of the house so I don’t stab him to death.” No, really. “It’s not complicated. You just stab.” Straight-talking Sicilian immigrant Isidora (Irene Sofia Lucio)—who tends to interrupt but eh, “I’m Italian, that’s what we do”—is also married “but really only for the green card.” A second Dora (Audrey Corsa) “didn’t read the flyer carefully enough” and thought she was going to a knitting circle. There’s Susan (Adina Verson), aka Susie Hurricane (“no, that’s not my legal name, but it is my real name”), who lives in her car with a bird; “I’m hopeful but I’m burnt the f**k out,” she declares, and Liberation really should consider putting that on a T-shirt. Editor Celeste (Kristolyn Lloyd) is writing her own book about Black women’s liberation “whose resistance is, in my opinion, overdue but as of yet completely unorganized”; she believes that “a woman speaking uninterrupted is a radical act,” and FYI that is on a T-shirt.
So much of Liberation—Wohl’s best play, and she’s had some excellent ones, including Small Mouth Sounds and Make Believe—feels like a radical act. This sensational cast, all in top form. The Act 2 nude scene, where the women say what they love and what they hate about their bodies. (Susie: “Ass good, tits feh.”) The brutal honesty: “You want a revolution,” Margie says to Lizzie, “but you want it on your terms and you don’t want to have to give up anything to get it.” The painful reverberations with present-day politics: When Isidora confesses that she voted for Nixon?! “I was pissed and fed up with this, this, this groovy meaningless liberal bullshit … and this feeling like came over me, like there are no good choices .… Maybe we blow it up and people get angry enough for real change.” (Flashbacks to 2016, when Susan Sarandon went scorched-earth, saying Trump would bring the revolution and “then things will really, you know, explode.”)
And the closing minutes, where Lizzie’s mom tells her inquisitive daughter that she’s totally off track: “I think it’s so interesting that you’re asking what we did wrong, instead of asking what’s wrong with the world.” We really have been asking the wrong questions all along, haven’t we?
Liberation opened Oct. 28, 2025, at the James Earl Jones Theatre and runs through February 1, 2026. Tickets and information: liberationbway.com
