For playwright Bess Wohl, “the personal is political” is more than a feminist rallying cry: it’s the story of her life – literally. Wohl (whose Liberation has received universal raves in its Broadway bow and was recently extended through February 1) received an education in feminism alongside her ABCs.
She recalls accompanying her mother, Lisa Cronin Wohl, to work at Ms. magazine, watching her sit at the typewriter beneath a poster of Wonder Woman and growing up with trading cards depicting “famous feminists” such as Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth.
Wohl’s upbringing mirrors that of the memory play’s protagonist, Lizzie, who recounts her late mother (also named Lizzie) bringing her to “a giant playroom filled with gender non-specific toys,” otherwise known as the Ms. tot lot. The metatheatrical Liberation is Lizzie’s attempt to reckon with who her mother was before she became her mother: the organizer of a women’s consciousness-raising group established in 1970, located in the basement of an Ohio rec center. Beyond that, the play serves as a desperate search for answers as to why it feels like everything her mother and her friends fought for is “slipping away” and “how [to] get it back.”
One would be forgiven for assuming that Trump’s presidencies, Dobbs, or any number of horrific developments from the past several years served as catalysts for the play. But Wohl, who began writing for her classmates as an acting student at Yale (she earned her MFA in 2002), says she’d “always wanted to write something about the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s”; it was only a matter of how. She tells Lilith that that landing on the idea to foreground a character toggling between past and present, speaking directly to the audience, was what finally “unlocked” the play for her.
Inevitably, though, politics has played a role in Wohl’s process, one from which she hasn’t shied away. Wohl first embarked on her research for the play – a series of conversations with a real consciousness-raising group from the ‘70s (whose members, in large part, have remained in touch), which she says provided the “foundational material” of Liberation, during the first Trump administration.
The play was in rehearsals for its off-Broadway premiere on Inauguration Day in 2025; but, like the rest of us, Wohl and her team did not know, when the production was first scheduled, whether it would be Trump or Kamala Harris in the White House. She was prepared to “pivot the play” slightly depending on the outcome, but adds that she “certainly didn’t anticipate that…things would feel so dire.”
Nonetheless, Wohl embraces the way the play organically lands with audiences as a result of the ever-changing present moment. Wohl recalls, for example, that when Celeste (Kristolyn Lloyd) – the only Black woman in the group – questioned, during a contentious debate surrounding the 1970 Strike for Equality, whether “protesting changes anything,” it had a different valence at the performance following the October 18 No Kings marches.
©Little Fang
Despite her personal proximity to the women’s liberation movement – whose trailblazers Wohl says were, for her, “like whatever childhood characters you attach yourself to” – she has no illusions about its complexity. Neither, she says, did the elders she interviewed, and she hopes to honor the multiplicity of women’s experiences during the movement and relationships to it today. Wohl acknowledges that feminism’s legacy is accompanied by a “very complicated and huge set of questions.”
But, she adds, “the play is attempting to, if not hold all of them, at least acknowledge that and live in the failed attempt – the beautiful, fertile, and exciting attempt to do something that will actually never, ever, ever, fully resolve.” This extends to the textured, irresistible humanity of each of the six women in the group, including Susie, a radical Jewish lesbian, played by Adina Verson (no stranger to queer Jewish stories onstage in Broadway’s Indecent and A Transparent Musical, based on the Amazon series). Wohl – herself Jewish, Mormon, and Irish Catholic – and her husband are raising their children in the Jewish faith.
When asked whether she views Judaism and feminism as complementary, or if she ever experiences a tension between them, she describes the principle of tikkun olam (Hebrew for “repairing the world”) as “so fundamental” to both. “They’re in dialogue in really complicated and interesting ways,” she adds, citing Susie’s background in the play. “[She] is really struggling to reconcile her faith and her upbringing and her identity and her activism and she’s basically kicked out of her family for who she is because she comes from a very conservative upbringing,” so, Wohl says, “I’m trying to hold all of it.”
At the heart of the play is present-day Lizzie’s wrestling with how her mother could have sacrificed her fierce opposition to marriage and the writing career she loved, finding the demands of raising a family too burdensome to maintain both, in a trajectory that echoes her own. To borrow from a line in the play: “But if you want to talk about love. And freedom? Well, yeah, it’s almost impossible to have both.”
Although Wohl has no illusions about theater’s capacity to solve gender inequity, I asked her what efforts went into the Liberation production process to embody the changes necessary in the industry–i.e., to better accommodate caregivers (who, of course, are – like a refreshing majority of the Liberation cast and creatives – disproportionately of marginalized genders).
She cited practices such as childcare stipends, welcoming artists’ children to accompany them at work, and taking Sundays off in lieu of the typical Mondays. She credits director Whitney White with prioritizing that “[everyone] felt cared for, recognized, empowered.” White and the team were “intentional” about “tr[ying] to support the caregivers and the marginalized people in our community in every way we could,” but acknowledges that “the industry overall has a very, very, very long way to go.” She adds, “I think, in challenging times, things shrink instead of expand. And people get left out, and people don’t get treated the way they should. And that is something that we just have to fight with everything, everything we have every single day that we show up for work.”
—Miranda Jackel is an NYC-based dramaturg and cultural worker.
No responses yet