The audience is roughly 3/4 gray-haired boomer women by the looks of it. If you get to the theater early you can quickly spot them—not by mutable hair color but by their lip synching the 60’s and 70’s playlist so expertly chosen to fill the James Earl Jones theater during the pre-show.
If you think noting the age of the audience doesn’t or shouldn’t matter, this reviewer says THINK AGAIN. Your age and where you were (or if you were alive) in the 60s and 70s straightjackets your experience of Liberation. For women of a certain age it’s more blinders than the typical filter one brings to a performance. That said, this play has something for American women —and men—of all ages.
LIBERATION Makes Us Laugh, Wince, and Nod With Familiarity
In what we imagine as a semi-autobiographical tale, playwright Bess Wohl takes us on that pilgrimage —peculiar to Western culture perhaps—- made by women grasping for adulthood. They want to understand what made Mommy tick. The subtext and super text of this quest is a desire by the fledgling woman-daughter to be anyone but her Mom.
…btw, Good luck with that girlfriend…. (You’ll need it.)
Wohl’s avatar is the daughter of Lizzie (played by magnetic Susannah Flood), the founder of a CR (Consciousness Raising) group at that moment in history when both the pill and the first issues of Ms. Magazine made their way to midwest Ohio. Throughout the play, Flood seamlessly swings open the fourth wall and a time machine — both. She is the story’s narrator who morphs back and forth from her mother’s persona, Lizzie, to her own, never confusing us during these transitions. No small feat!
Central casting (and Wohl’s pen) does its work to bring a cross section of women to the group— or skipping the group— in keeping with the times. There is Dora (Audrey Corsa), the blonde bombshell who stumbled into the meeting thinking it was a knitting circle. Middle-aged Margie (Betty Aidem) is the long-suffering wife seeking escape from her newly retired husband. Perhaps a tad less stereotypical are: Isadora (Irene Sofia Lucio), a self-styled activist who married for a Green Card; Susan (Adina Verson), a one-time Hasidic daughter now living in her car but longing for a motorcycle; and Celeste (Kristolyn Lloyd), a Black New York intellectual sophisticate who has moved back to the Midwest to be her ailing mother’s caretaker.
Outside this CR group, these are women —each lovable in their own way— who likely wouldn’t know each other, let alone come to feel sisterly towards, or indulge in bare all (SPOILER ALERT: literally!) Intimacy.
The group has found a basement space in a school gym that smells of boys’ athletic teams. We can’t quite smell that, be we certainly can smell the cigarette smoke one or another woman puffs from time to time, reminding us of how much the world has changed. We smile at their struggles to be leaderless, in the anti-patriarchal spirit that was newly all the vogue.
Most poignantly, in this writer’s view, Wohl creates the character of Diane (Kayla Davion), a harried Black mother of four with absolutely no time for this CR nonsense and especially for meetings that are scheduled at just the hour when she has to feed her hungry children. Diane’s existence reminds of a crucial fact, CR,—and especially the variants that overdosed on dissecting imagined micro-aggressions— was a commodity only for the privileged.
Wohl has done her homework. Liberation is an entertaining blast from the past, as veterans of that cultural hour are prone to say.
But also— Liberation is an important reminder of gender issues in the US, summarized best by Google AI which reports—-
‘…In 1970, US women earned roughly 59 cents for every dollar men made, a significant gap from men's higher median incomes, but today (around 2022-2024), that ratio has improved to about 84 cents…”
Liberation is recommended for boomers of all genders and the sociologically curious of all ages.
WHEN:
October 8, 2025 - January 11, 2026
WHERE:
James Earl Jones Theater
138 W 48th St
New York, NY 10036
About the Author: Amy Munice
Amy Munice is Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher of Picture This Post. She covers books, dance, film, theater, music, museums and travel. Prior to founding Picture This Post, Amy was a freelance writer and global PR specialist for decades—writing and ghostwriting thousands of articles and promotional communications on a wide range of technical and not-so-technical topics.
