Liberation

Does the truth actually set you free – even if you can discover it? That question seems entirely appropriate for a play entitled “Liberation,” Bess Wohl’s provocative, intricately structured, autobiographically inspired drama now at Broadway’s James Earl Jones Theater (after a run last year at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre). Exquisitely acted by an eight-person ensemble and directed with extraordinary acuity by Whitney White, “Liberation” proves to be must-see theater.

That may not feel immediately apparent as we are greeted by a rather ditzy-sounding narrator named Lizzie (the super-endearing Susannah Flood) – a stand-in for Wohl – who soon takes us back to 1970 Ohio and steps into the shoes of her mother, also named Lizzie, a young journalist who has just formed a consciousness-raising group.

What will eventually become apparent, though, is that present-day Lizzie is not only questioning her life choices – which includes being a wife and mother – but her mother’s choice to leave Ohio and her group behind to marry her father Bill (the well-chosen Charlie Thurston), a corporate lawyer, and settle into a more traditional life in New York City.

The other big question for the younger Lizzie is whether “women’s lib” accomplished anything, given that Roe v. Wade was overturned after 50 years and the Equal Rights Amendment was never passed. Yet, as we watch the women of the 1970s group make changes, both subtle and drastic, to their own lives, the answer to this question proves easier to determine than the first one.

The group, which meets in the basement basketball court of a local recreation center (designed perfectly by David Zinn), proves to be almost stereotypically diverse: Dora (a lovely Audrey Corso), a beautiful worker at a wine company who is constantly judged by her looks and not her brain; Celeste (a fine Kristolyn Lloyd), an African-American intellectual book editor caring for her ailing mother; Isidora (a fiery Irene Sofia Lucio), a strong-willed, big-mouthed Italian-immigrant filmmaker stuck with a low-level job and a husband she married for a Green Card; Susan (a memorable Adina Verson), a lesbian poet living in her car with her beloved bird; and Margie (the truly remarkable Betsy Aidem), an older housewife desperate to break free of her domestic dreariness, without any idea of how to do it or where to go.

If the group’s camaraderie builds slowly — and continually faces its fair share of dissension over everything from going on strike to leaving spouses — the women bond completely during one meeting where they strip themselves naked and discuss what they love and hate about their bodies. (For this reason, all phones are put in Yonder pouches at the beginning of the show.) It’s a brave, uncomfortable scene, yet it works spectacularly in showing their common ground.

A couple of other scenes concerning the future between Lizzie and Bill are also uncomfortable – at least for the present-day Lizzie, leading her to ask Joanne (the superb Kayla Davion) – heretofore a cameo player – to play her mother during them. While initially distracting, these conversations prove to be the much-needed missing piece to the puzzle of the older Lizzie’s decision-making.

Finally, in the show’s strongest scene, Margie transforms into the older Lizzie (now dead) to face her daughter with all her fears and queries. Unsurprisingly, she has perspective – if little else – to truly offer.

“It’s a problem, a huge problem– and I don’t just mean you of course,” she tells her daughter. “I mean, your whole generation. It was a huge problem for us, the having you, the raising you, and the way you took so much for granted and let so much slide — not just the political progress but the community — the solidarity– I don’t know where that is now, maybe it’s there. Maybe it’s here. I really don’t know. And knowing that the things we said and did, the conversations we had, are still here? That they’re not over. Well, I guess that’s the solution. It’s the problem. And the solution.”

As Wohl knows, theater’s job is not to provide easy answers or maybe even make us feel better, but to enlighten us about the past and the present (and maybe even the future). There can be no better shining example of this than “Liberation.”
By Brian Scott Lipton