A look into America’s political past, Liberation is also a personal story, inspired by Wohl’s own mother, who worked at Ms. magazine during the playwright’s youth. But the Tony-nominated playwright, who made her Broadway debut in 2020 with the comedy Grand Horizons, did not imagine her latest work would be quite so relevant today.
When Liberation opened off-Broadway in February 2025, directed by Tony nominee Whitney White, reviews were rapturous. The women’s fight against the patriarchy resonated with audiences reeling from the rollback of reproductive rights, and whose algorithms were flooded with tradwife content.
“I knew what we had, but you never know,” White says of the play’s reception. “Someone can have a message, but you have to deliver the right message at the right time. And I was like, ‘Is this the right time? Are people ready to hear this? And will they enter the story the way we’re entering the story?’ And as it turns out, it was.”
Audiences related to the story in many respects—to the anger at inequality in the workplace, the fear of losing bodily rights, the frustration with the sluggish pace of progress, and the exhaustion from the ongoing fight. In one scene, a character declares, “I am so hopeful, but I am burned the fuck out,” a line Wohl pulled from one of her interviews.
“She said, ‘By the 1970s I was burnt out on women’s liberation,’ and I thought, wow, the arc of history is so much longer than we realize,” Wohl says. “Already in 1970 women were feeling frustrated, like, ‘When is this gonna happen?’ And I think that that urgency really powers so much of the story of the play.” Present-day activists can relate: While the first Women’s March, held after Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, counted more than half a million attendees in Washington D.C.—the largest single-day protest in US history—the 2025 People’s March, after his second victory, peaked at approximately 50,000 people.
#Bess #Wohl #Whitney #White #Radical #Relevance #Liberation
