It may be 2025 outside, but visitors to the James Earl Jones Theater will be granted a one-way ticket back to the 1970s. Bess Wohl's Liberation premiered on Broadway on Oct. 28 following an award-winning off-Broadway run earlier this year. Currently scheduled for a 12-week booking, the play embeds viewers in an Ohio gymnasium where the members of a women's lib group congregate each week to swap stories and inspire each other to make major life choices.
Framed as a variation on a "memory play," Wohl's narrative centers around Lizzie (Susannah Flood), whose late mother was a member of that group. Speaking directly to the audience from the present day, Lizzie also slips into her mom's skin for the '70s sequences, but also steps out of the story to interrogate the characters onstage when events hit too close to home. It's a bold fourth-wall breaking conceit that culminates in a deeply emotional final scene. (Ticket purchasers should be aware that your phones will be pouched during the production to protect the performers' privacy during a key scene containing nudity.)
Critics were certainly moved by Liberation, awarding the Broadway production a chorus of raves. Writing in The Daily Beast, Tim Teeman calls the play "excellent" and "affecting," adding: "Liberation has a lot to say about careers, motherhood, sexuality, independence, harassment, equal pay, and workplace mistreatment (and many other things besides), but it is resolutely not a pamphlet or polemic. Its arguments about women’s place, power, and agency are rooted not just in experiences, but in questions— some of the answers to which emerge, while others remain elusive."
Over in The New York Times, Elisabeth Vincentelli agrees that Liberation isn't in any way homework. "Not only does its sustained pace make the story downright suspenseful ... but spending time in [the characters'] company is also an unadulterated pleasure. Directed with sensitivity by Whitney White and performed by a cast preternaturally in sync, The production looks at community and individuality, determination and self-determination, in an elegiac and impassioned manner."
The Wrap's Robert Hofler has no qualms about labeling Liberation 2025's best play. "No other medium — not film, not a novel — could handle this symbiosis with such apparent ease," he writes of the staging. "Wohl is so skillful in telling this free-floating story that even those subtle clues are not always necessary under Whitney White’s taut direction."
Writing in The Guardian, Adrian Horton confesses to being somewhat underwhelmed by the play's first act, comparing it to a "museum exhibit." Act 2, however, pulled her in. "The play’s second half unravels the frayed distinctions between then and now, memory and reality, skirting the line of self-awareness without tipping fully into self-importance," Horton notes. "The play offers no concrete answers; one’s personal politics and choices remain, as ever, a thicket of contradictions. Liberation finds, in that, an immutable and potent grief — for the costs of our failings, for all that’s been lost, for the questions we thought too late to ask. But that doesn’t mean ... that we shouldn’t still ask them."
