Playwright Bess Wohl Reveals the Naked Truth in Liberation on Broadway

Playwright Bess Wohl grew up steeped in feminism. Her mother worked at Ms. Magazine and its ideals shaped her childhood. That early education has become Liberation, her new Broadway play opening this fall at the James Earl Jones Theatre, directed by Whitney White.

“The play really came from this almost lifelong desire, from when I was very small, to understand the feminist movement,” Wohl told Broadway.com Managing Editor Beth Stevens on The Broadway Show With Tamsen Fadal’s Fall Preview episode. “I spent a lot of my childhood going to Ms., meeting her friends and growing up with feminist flashcards [think Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony] instead of baseball cards.”

Liberation moves between the 1970s and today. “I wanted an opportunity to look at and talk about all of the changes that are happening in the world right now,” Wohl said. The women of the 1970s “loomed really large for me. So I wanted to find a way to put those two decades and time periods in conversation with each other. The play quite literally puts them in conversation with each other.”

“By 1970, I was just so burnt out on feminism,” one woman told her during research. “That feeling of exhaustion and burnout and frustration that I think a lot of people are feeling now, they were feeling it then, too,” Wohl said. “So parallels started to emerge.”

As she wrestled with how to tell the story, Wohl made her creative blocks part of the play itself. “I'm putting my process on the stage. Things that were struggles for me as a writer I embodied on the stage with a lot of transparency,” she said. “When I didn't know what to do next, one of the characters would say, ‘I don't know where to go next.’ That's new for me. I've never written in this way before. It's really been exciting.”

That spirit fuels one of the play’s boldest moments: a consciousness-raising group meeting in the nude. “It was something that the women that I spoke to really wanted to talk about, and I just felt like I had never seen a scene like that on stage before,” she said. With an intimacy coordinator guiding the work, its raw vulnerability became “the heartbeat of the play in certain ways.”

Wohl, whose plays include Small Mouth Sounds, the Tony-nominated Grand Horizons, Camp Siegfried, Continuity and more, has often explored group dynamics. “I'm kind of an introvert and an extrovert at the same time,” she said. “I really need community and thrive on it, or I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing.” Yet solitude is just as important. In her sun-filled Brooklyn office, Wohl laughed that it is where she writes her plays and “mostly naps.” For her, “the conversation between loneliness and community, two sides of the same coin” is always present.

What began as a play about politics and friendship also became a family story. “I didn't know I was writing a mother-daughter play when I started. I mean, I thought I was writing a play about the movement, women, the 1970s, female friendship, and all of that is in the play,” Wohl said. “But what came out of it was really a relationship between a daughter and a mother, a daughter really searching for answers about her mother's life. My own mother and I were in deep conversation when I was writing this play. She's a huge part of it, and there are conversations in the play that the daughter character never got to have with her mother, that I have gotten to have with my mother as a result.”

In Liberation, that daughter is Lizzie, played by Susannah Flood, who moves across time as she pieces together her mother’s story. Wohl hopes audiences will make their own discoveries, too. “I hope that it makes them think a little bit more and maybe differently about the concept of liberation in their own lives,” she said. “Because I think so much freedom comes from truthful conversation, and the play is really about the courage to have that conversation.”

Watch the video below.

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