Bess Wohl on Feminism, Nudity, and Time Travel in Liberation

It took Bess Wohl a long time to write what would eventually become Liberation, her acclaimed play which opened last week on Broadway. After all, she started thinking about making something about the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s about 20 years ago.

“I was trying to crack it really not for political reasons, but for personal reasons, for most of my writing life,” she says in a recent Zoom call. 

Now Liberation exists in a world that has, in many ways, shockingly regressed with the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the rise of “tradwife culture.” The circumstances make the work feel more urgent than ever. Still, the production doesn’t profess to explain where we are now.  Instead, it’s a deeply inquisitive look at how we got here. 

The play opens with a narrator (Susannah Flood) directly addressing the crowd, explaining that she is going to tell the story of her mother, Lizzie (also played by Flood), who started a consciousness raising group in an Ohio rec center basement. Director Whitney White invites us into that room and we meet the women who have gathered—among them, a housewife who has grown disillusioned with her life (Betsy Aidem); a woman caring for her ailing mother while writing a book on radical feminism (Kristolyn Lloyd); an Italian immigrant in a green card marriage (Irene Sofia Lucio). But Flood often steps out of the action to comment on it and bring us into the present, along the way eliciting questions that range from “what went wrong?” to “is marriage an act of betrayal?”

The ways in which Liberation moves through time and breaks from theatrical convention, including by having its actors play multiple roles, make it a sort of magic trick that turns cathartic, not just for the characters on stage, but for the audience. Speaking with TIME, Wohl discussed how she finally nailed down the narrative and what she makes of the intimate conversations the play is sparking. 

TIME: What made you want to write this? 

Wohl: Because my mom worked at Ms., I grew up steeped in the ideas of second wave feminism and women’s liberation. And I loved them. I loved sitting on the floor of her office under a giant Wonder Woman poster while I could hear her clacking away and having a little basket of toys that I could play with. As I got older, the world changed, but also, I started to come into contact with some of those ideas in a personal way. I got married. I had children. I tried to have a career and be taken seriously. All of a sudden, I started to experiment with these ideas in my own life:”What was correct, what was wrong, what was left out? Are these actually practical?”

Betsy Aidem, right, as a housewife who has grown disillusioned with her life Little Fang

What has been your relationship to second wave feminism? It has gotten a bad rap over the years. 

I didn’t want to leave any of that out of the play. The play is struggling to contain all of it, at the same time knowing that it’s impossible to contain all of it. One of the things I love to do when I write a play is set myself up an impossible task and then show people my attempt. [When I was raised] we talked about boys and girls being completely the same. You can do anything a boy can do, and in fact, it doesn’t really matter what your gender is. I listened to Free to Be… You and Me on repeat. As I got older, especially as I became a mother, I learned that, as Betsy Aidem’s character in the play says, the expectations and the rules are not equal and they never will be. That line gets applause some nights because I think people understand that now in a different way. 

How did you crack what the play was going to be? Because the structure is so unique. It’s a memory play that’s not actually a memory because the narrator is the daughter of the woman whose story she is telling. 

Once I introduced the narrator, the whole play opened up for me. I had started thinking this is going to be about this group of women in the ’70s trying to change the world. It is about that to a degree, but it also now is in direct conversation with today because of this character who goes back and forth in time and who actually plays her own mother. So much of my life was a conversation in my own head about whether or not I was going to become my mother. My mother was also a writer. I had to go and become an actress for a little while because I was not going to become my mother. The act of having a character physically embody a struggle that had been in my own head for so long felt really powerful to me.

Susannah Flood as the narrator in Liberation Little Fang

How much did the regression women are experiencing in this moment influence the play?

I think I would’ve written the play either way. It was own personal history. I couldn’t have anticipated how women’s rights would be under assault in our current world. That only upped the urgency and affected deeply how people are receiving the play. It’s like the audience comes in ready to receive and ready to speak up. 

When I saw the play, a woman in the audience actually consoled the narrator when she mentioned on stage that her mother was no longer alive. How have you experienced the audience reaction? 

I’ve observed those things too. People feel that they have a stake in what’s happening and permission to show up in that way. It’s something that I wish happened more at the theater. The fourth wall can really be a sad thing because ultimately, we’re all here in community together. That’s the point of theater. Our bodies are in space together in this moment, not to wax poetic, but it’s never going to happen again just like this. To create a piece that feels so alive to people that they have to sit forward and have their voice be heard too in the expression of it, that’s really incredible to me.

What was your research process beyond your personal experience? 

I had looked at old periodicals and done a broad array of reading. But the thing that really cracked it open was starting to speak to women who were active in the second wave, in particular, members of a certain consciousness raising group. I would talk to one person and then she would say, “Oh, you got to talk to my friend so-and-so.” It allowed me to get really specific about who these women were beyond the things that you can read in a book. It was their voices that started activating in my mind. I was in conversation with them, and it felt like it gave me permission to write the play because suddenly I felt grounded in a different authenticity. 

The play is very explicit about your own limitations as a white woman telling this story. How did you approach that? 

That is one place where the research really helped me. One of the women that this group directed me to was named Celestine Ware, a Black feminist writer who has passed away, but who provided some foundational ideas and helped me understand the character of Celeste, played by Kristolyn Lloyd. Being grounded in the real gave me a feeling of permission that I might not have had otherwise. 

The form of the play is very overtly grappling with this in the way it allows actors to step into the shoes of multiple characters. That theatrical language is asking what the limits of identity are, and can we ever overcome them. The goal was to create that representation while being honest about the limitations of my own understanding. One thing that I love that Whitney did in the direction of the play was that she kept Susannah Flood on stage the entire time. The fact that this is her fever dream is knit into the way that this is presented.

Kristolyn Lloyd as Celeste Little Fang

At the top of the second act, the women all appear nude and discuss their bodies. How did that come about?

It came again from my conversations with these women and writings that they directed me to. I just felt that this is a really important part of the work and of their legacy. I knew that it would be risky, and that it would shock some people, and we would have to do with a lot of care and thought and intentionality. This scene where women are nude on stage but are not sexualized feels really important to me. Women’s bodies can exist in space in this way. We can be subjects, not objects, and this is what it looks like, and audience, you are going to witness it now.

Because of the nude scene, the audience members have to put their phones away in Yondr pouches, which are locked for the duration of the show. It really makes you connect with the play. 

I never could have anticipated that that would be one of the most liberating things about seeing this play, right? We’re going to liberate you from this technology, which honestly is such a huge just time suck for so many people. This play is about having deep and truthful conversation. That’s what happens among the women, and hopefully, that’s what this provokes in the audience after they leave. So putting your phone away is part of that experience. I’ve heard from audience members that the conversations that they were able to have even during intermission without their phone around were really unique and deep for them. 

What have been some of the most surprising reactions you’ve heard? 

I think a lot of people leave this play saying they want to call their mom, or they want to come back with their mom, or it made them think about their relationship with their mom in a different way. That’s been really beautiful that the play could actually create a very personal action step. Other people come home and see their relationship with their partner in a different way. This play can penetrate the walls of people’s homes and their personal experiences in such intimate ways. Of course, this play asks a lot of political questions, but the intimacy of the responses has been the real surprise. 

Has it transformed the way you think about your relationship with your own mother? 

It has, in a way, because one of the many questions raised in the play is whether it’s possible to see—now I’m going to get emotional—whether it’s possible to see your mom as a person beyond the role she played in your life. Looking back at this time, thinking about my mom as a young woman, just setting out in life, is something that I’ve been able to and really hold in a different way. Betsy Aidem says in the play, “Maybe I should have showed you more of who I was.” Of course, that’s so difficult as a mom. I’m a mom myself now, and I have three daughters. Am I showing them too much? Am I not showing them enough? Will they ever see me as something beyond mom, and should they? To be able to see the full humanity of my mom and think about her life choices in that way has been really transformational for me and for our relationship.