Liberation
Viewing the women’s movement since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, one wonders whether the struggling waves of feminism over the years have yielded lasting results. Bess Wohl’s Liberation directed by Whitey White, enjoying its premiere at Roundabout Theatre Company, asks this vital question. Currently at the Laura Pels Theate until April 6, Wohl’s new play humorously explores women’s “progress” through the lens of a daughter whose mom initiated a consciousness-raising group.
To investigate women’s progress, Wohl shifts back and forth in time, beginning in the present. First, the unreliable narrator, Lizzie (Susannah Flood), introduces herself comfortably to the audience. Then, she sets up the premise she intends to examine. If the women’s movement made great strides for women’s rights, what happened? How could the movement have cascaded into the failures of the present? Wohl never mentions the elephants in the room: the MAGA party of Donald Trump, the conservative Supreme Court, and DEI bans. Should she have? Perhaps.
Ohio, 1970
Attempting to move to an identifiable sphere of influence, Flood’s Lizzie flashes back to her mom’s social construct, Ohio, 1970. Assuming the role of her mother, Lizzie enacts how her mom established a consciousness-raising group. The six women meet regularly sitting in chairs on the basement basketball court at the a local rec center. Contrary to expectations, they include a Black woman, Celeste (Kristolyn Lloyd), and the older, married Margie (Betsy Aidem). As Lizzie’s fertile imagination reconstructs their sessions, she illuminates her impression of evolving feminism of the time..
Having verified stories of the past with her mom (now deceased) and the still-living members of the group, Lizzie evokes the first session. After introducing themselves, the women discuss why they need this community in their lives, and indicate how they’ve personally experienced cultural oppression. They express their hope that these meetings will inspire them to change the culture as they evolve their responses to the patriarchy. As weeks pass they clarify their own personal obstacles and their long, bumpy road to change, with ironic surprises and setbacks.
For example, Margie’s perspective as housewife and mother, whose kids have left, evolves. Publicity about the women’s movement opens her eyes to her demeaning role as housewife. To get her husband to help with chores takes a bomb blast. After months of group meetings and discussions about his stubbornness, he actually does do the dishes. Ironically, Margie realizes the downside. Practiced, she completes housework faster and better than he. To her surprise, she realizes her role as housewife and nurturer satisfies her. Besides, she lacks the courage to leave him and start anew. Betsy Aidem is superb as the humorous older member, who initially introduces herself by announcing she joined so she wouldn’t stab her retired husband to death.
Activists
Some members, like Sicilian-accented Isidora (Irene Sofia Lucio) and Lloyd’s Celeste, belonged to other activist groups (e.g. SNCC). Circumstances brought them to Ohio. Isidora’s green-card marriage needs six more months and a no-fault divorce, not possible in Ohio. Celeste, a New Yorker, has moved to the Midwest to take care of her sickly mom. The role of caretaker dumped on her by uncaring siblings tries her patience and stresses her out.
Then there’s Susan (Adina Verson). An activist burnt out on “women’s liberation,” Susan has nothing to say beyond “women are human beings.” She avers that if men don’t treat women with equality and respect, then women’s activism is like “shitting in the wind.” Estranged from her father who sat shiva for her when she left home, and without a job and shelter, Susan lives in her car.
Lizzie and Dora (Audrey Corsa) complete the group. Both discuss how they suffer discrimination at their jobs. As a journalist, Lizzie’s assignments encompass weddings. After complaining, she graduates to obituaries. Her boss refuses to advance her by assigning her complicated stories. Likewise, Dora watches men be promoted as she stays in place. Upset about inequity with their male counterparts, the playwright reminds us of women’s lack of substantial progress in the work force. Very few women still manage to break through “glass ceilings” and achieve equal pay.
Despite covering familiar ground. Act I engages. Wohl’s choice of time fluidity, shifting from past to present and back, her humorous dialogue and the superb acting ensemble maintain our engagement.
A highly stylized Liberation
As Lizzie searches for answers, she directs the action and characters by seamlessly cuing them in. When a man arrives on the scene at the end of Act I and begins shooting hoops, one detects a silent gasp from the audience. How is a man integral to a play about freedom from male cultural oppression? When Lizzie refers to the guy as Bill, her father (Charlie Thurston), we get the irony. How “freeing” that her mom meets her dad as she advocates for freedom from male domination, only to be dominated by an institution (marriage) constructed precisely for that purpose.
Leaving us to ponder that disconnect, Act II opens with another revelation. To exemplify their hope to extricate themselves from the psychological trauma of men’s objectification of their bodies, the women sit nude. During a round-robin each discusses what they appreciate and dislike about their bodies. As a theatrical artifice Wohl’s nude segment curiously makes sense since men use women’s physical bodies to divide them against themselves and each other. Nevertheless, the scene leaves a whiff of “gimmick” in the air, though Whitney White directs it cleverly.
Can love and freedom co-exist in relationships?
After the nude scene Lizzie reimagines how her mom and Bill fell in love. To avoid discomfort in “being” with her father, she engages Joanne (Kayla Davion) to play the role of her mother. Not a member of the group, Joanne interrupts their meetings periodically to look for her children’s backpacks which they left behind. Lizzie conveniently selects Joanne to keep her secret love life from the group.
However, secrets have a way of uncovering themselves. When Bill tells Lizzie he plans to move to New York City with a new job and asks Lizzie to marry him, Lizzie faces a conundrum. Should she tell her sisters in liberation? When she does, the dam bursts and each of the women reveal secrets that they have been hiding. In every instance hypocrisy raises its ugly head. No matter how pristine and righteously they sought to uphold the women’s feminist cause, their humanity peeks through. Each group member has made compromises. The ensemble is at the top of their game in this funny, “freeing” interchange toward the last segment of Act II.
Lizzie imagines a mother-daughter heart-to-heart
The hypocrisy scene becomes the fulcrum that Wohl uses to revisit how women might have failed themselves in trying to advance their rights. For the expiation and explanation of how women falter and compromise their own best interests, Lizzie reimagines a conversation with her deceased mother. To effect the scene Margie acts the part of her mother. Lizzie asks if she made the right choice to get married. In her answer Lizzie’s mom affirms what we know. Rarely do daughters understand their mothers’ perspectives. In Lizzie’s reimaginings, Lizzie has gotten much of it wrong.
However, we understand the guilt and recrimination inherent in Lizzie’s questions about the failures of feminism. Indeed, it is almost as if the evils of the patriarchy, so readily internalized by women, stand and condemn feminism for its ineffectiveness. Wohl makes the point that the opposite is true. With clarity and vision, one sees that the feminist movements in all their stages have been successful. Ultimately, though, the question whether one might be “liberated” and fall in love and “live equitably” in an institution which consigns women to compromise their autonomy, depends upon the individuals. For that reason, Wohl implies the question is unanswerable.
The beautifully acted scene between Flood and Aidem resonates with warmth and truth. You will just have to see Liberation to experience this capstone conclusion to a profound play that appears facile because it is seamlessly crafted by the actors and director.
Kudos to the creatives. These include David Zinn (set design), Qween Jean (costume design), Cha See (lighting design), Palmer Hefferan (sound design), and Nikiya Mathis (hair and wig design).
Liberation runs two hours 30 minutes with one 15-minute intermission until April 6 at Laura Pels Theatre, 111 W. 46th St, New York, NY.
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