The memory play is a genre that has grown a bit stale since Tennessee Williams shattered it with The Glass Menagerie’s Broadway premiere in 1944. But Tony-nominee Bess Wohl has breathed new, challenging and messy (in a good way) life into the genre with her award-winning work, Liberation, which saw its off-Broadway premiere earlier this year via the Roundabout Theatre Company. It has now moved to Broadway, superb cast intact, in an often-hilarious, tremendously poignant and scarily timely production, directed by Tony-nominee Whitney White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding).
Set in Ohio in the early 1970s, Wohl’s play is based on real events but is not autobiographical, although it is so potent, it will feel that way. It’s also proof that socially and politically, everything old is new again, and vice-versa.
The entire 2-hour-30-minute piece takes place in a pungent YMCA gym basement where a group of wildly different, but bonded, women gather for a weekly “consciousness raising,” basically figuring out their place in the new wave of feminism that began taking shape in the 1960s.
The leader, although she refuses to call herself that is Lizzie (an excellent Susannah Flood). But when we Flood first takes the stage she is playing Lizzie’s daughter, telling the tale of how her mom initially put up a flyer that formed the group and how these women would go on to make significant changes in their lives… and the world as well as in each other’s lives. “But where did it all go wrong?” That specific question haunts daughter Lizzie and the proceedings, although is the correct question to be asking?
Margie (Tony-nominee for Prayer for the French Republic Betsy Aidem, amazing) is the eldest of the group, stuck in a marriage where she basically has to do everything for her husband. “I need things to get me out of the house, so I don’t stab him to death,” Margie quite seriously states.
Isidora (Irene Sofia Lucio, fab) is the boisterous, colorful, Italian immigrant, whose mother gave her away to nuns to raise. The character has one-liners to spare. “The nuns were monsters, but at least they were women in leadership positions.”
Black feminist Celeste (Kristolyn Lloyd) has temporarily (she hopes) returned to Ohio, from New York to care for her sickly mother.
Free-spirit Susan (Adina Verson) lives out of her car and is probably the most radical of the women.
And young, pretty Dora (Audrey Corsa) is initially there because she mistook the group for a knitting-circle. But she keeps showing up. Dora is stuck in a no-where job where she’s denied promotions because of her gender.
Oh, and Joanne (Kayla Davion, just brilliant), another Black woman, enters early in act one as a mother looking for her son’s backpack, only to return in Act Two and steal every moment she’s in.
Liberation does what the best plays are supposed to do, ask questions and leave the audience with lots to chew on. This one does that magnificently, while providing seven incredibly talented female actors—and a lone male (Charlie Thurston) the kind of roles they can sink their souls into.
The beginning of Act Two has received a lot of attention because the six key characters appear naked for a significant amount of time (cell phones are properly pouched at each performance). Once the initial shock wears off, the scene becomes a powerful statement and then settles into something more sublime. It’s all a part of Wohl’s challenging us—and herself—to rethink everything the patriarchy has forced on us. She takes an age-old trope (Let’s go around and say one thing we love and one thing we hate about our bodies.) and subverts it.
Late in the play, after an explosive scene between Celeste and Joanne, Celeste turns to Lizzie (as storyteller) and harshly admonishes her, “Maybe just stick to your own story…Stick to what you know.” As a writer who wishes to explore different characters and stories that line truly bothered me until I realized that, like so much of what the playwright was putting forth, the words were meant to spark dialogue, not offer absolutes. The entire play ultimately wonders about the retelling of stories and how (in)accurate they usually are, even when you have the people around who went through the experience, retelling them. The only thing we can rely on is the power of the creative imagination to capture the essence of the thing. Hopefully.
Liberation is currently playing at the James Earl Jones Theatre (138 West 48th St).
