Left to right: Susannah Flood, Irene Sofia Lucio, Adina Verson, Kristolyn Lloyd, Betsy Aidem, and Audrey Corsa in Liberation. Photo: Joan Marcus

Liberation is subtitled “a memory play about things I don’t remember,” which is both an accurate description and a wild oversimplification of the structures of perspective in Bess Wohl’s new play, which layers 2025, an unspecified recent past, and the 1970s over each other, in slippery ways. It’s not that the play’s narrator–who is and is not a stand-in for the playwright herself–has forgotten what she’s trying to retrieve, but that the person to whom the memories belong isn’t the person who’s trying to revisit them; these memories are lost, not forgotten. Lizzie (Susannah Flood) is dead, and her adult daughter (also Flood, whose shuttling between the 1970s mother and the 2025 daughter-narrator commenting from the present on mother-Lizzie, is equally slippery, under Flood’s warm persona of rueful transparency), faced with the world in which we all currently live, and faced with a grief that she can’t even put into words, is trying to figure out where it all went wrong: How the passion and activism of the civil rights movement and women’s lib and anti-Vietnam struggles devolved into a present of impotent rage against a world on fire. How a radical activist became a suburban lawyer’s wife. How progress curdles and stagnates. How, swearing she’d never be anything like her mother, the narrator [the script also calls her Lizzie, but to keep the layers clear, I’ll refer to her as “narrator’] lost so many chances to ask her mother what being her was actually like. 

Liberation, then, is as much a play about the failure of memory as a memory play: It’s about how what we think we know is never remotely adequate to understanding the past, about how death closes doors to our past that grief desperately wishes to reopen—and on top of that, it’s a play that charts how very bad memory is at being accurate or complete or anything other than hopelessly compromised and partial. Even with full access to her mother’s memories, the narrator would only be inhabiting one perspective in a story that’s also about six other women (and tangentially, one man, the narrator’s father, but he’s as much antagonist as partner in this part of Lizzie’s story). And even, as we see at the end, with all her attempts to burrow her way into her mother’s perspective, she mostly gets it wrong. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, goes the old saying—but here, a generational act of forgetting has made that past so irretrievable that we don’t even know whether we’re repeating it or not. It’s not just the details and events of her mother’s feminist past that seem lost to a 2020-something American woman, but the ideals that inspired them, perhaps even the idea of having ideals at all. 

In 1970 Lizzie started (or so we think; one thing we gradually realize about her, and her daughter, is that both are unable to see the story in a way that doesn’t center her mother/herself) a consciousness-raising group in suburban Ohio that lasted for almost five years. The women in it were a random set who saw Lizzie’s flyer and showed up in a rec center basement—ranging in age from early twenties to sixties; mostly but not entirely white; mostly but not entirely working women; some married and some single but none (as will become important later) with small children at that moment. Lizzie herself, twenty-something and white, is an aspiring journalist with a degree in international relations, stuck on the weddings and obituaries beat at an Ohio newspaper. Margie (Betsy Aidem) is a late-middle-aged white woman desperate to get a break from her retired, retrograde husband before she snaps and stabs him; she has two grown sons. Susan (Adina Verson), a radical Jewish activist disowned by her family (it’s implied but not quite said at the outset that it’s because she’s a lesbian), has wound up living in her car and is desperate for her life to move forward. Isidora (Irene Sofia Lucio) is an aspiring Italian filmmaker in a green card marriage but with real political ambitions. Celeste (Kristolyn Lloyd), a Harvard-educated Black editor and writer who’s been dragged back to Ohio to care for her slowly dying mother, needs intelligent people to talk to now that her passionate reader of a mother is descending into dementia. And Dora (Audrey Corsa), a pretty young white secretary who thought she was joining a knitting circle, leaps in to feminism with both feet.

Susan, Celeste, and Isidora know what they’re doing there all along, and while their characters open up and reveal more of themselves as we proceed, it’s nothing compared to watching Aidem’s Margie and Corsa’s Dora find their feet and their voice; we can almost feel them both taking up more physical space as the play goes on. (The final character, Kayla Davion’s Joanne, is a pointed outsider to the group, a Black mother of four whose life doesn’t permit the luxury of what she sees as self-indulgent white activism.)

Throughout, the narrator tries and almost-but-not-quite succeeds to stand in her mother’s shoes, oscillating between her present and her mother’s past, never quite brave enough to see her mother whole. When the other women in the group try to point out Lizzie’s blind spots (either in the present or the past), we can almost see the criticisms bounce off her daughter; she’s allowed to be critical but she wants to mythologize her mother as well. (As Margie says in a different context, she wants things to be different, but she doesn’t want to give up anything to get there.) In the daughter’s eyes, her mother was the perfect do-it-all mother, but also an example of how feminism failed the next generation. Of how feminism is failing the daughter even now, as she sees herself repeating what alternately feel like mistakes and brave choices. 

The women’s perspectives can be bracing and wry, and the narrator strives for a chummy intimacy with both us and with her mother’s friends, but it’s clear throughout that the play draws from a very deep well of grief for both herself and the world. It’s all drawn with intricate, precise care by Wohl and directed with a bold richness and brash character portraits by Whitney White. Flood’s Lizzie can seem guileless, but the others recognize the strong will and stubbornness that we, too, can see. Aidem’s prickly resignation; Verson’s fierce urge toward self-determination; Lloyd’s rage contained under a thin layer of perfect poise; Lucia’s feisty spirit (yes, it’s a little bit of a cliche of an Italian, but she too gets her moment of real emotion); Corsa’s growing self-confidence: White calibrates the layers perfectly, and Qween Jean’s costumes and Nikiya Mathis’s hair and wigs sketch character into a pair of boots, the slogan on a T-shirt, the contours of an afro. And if it were just these portraits of the women of second-wave feminism, the play would be well worth your time. 

But Liberation is also a very tricky theatrical construction, never doing less than two things at once: presenting the 1970s but remembering it wrong; commenting on our present by pointing to our past; commenting on our past to understand our present; highlighting the stories left out of the dominant narrative and failing to find a place for them either. The ensemble remains dressed a la the 1970s throughout and all of the action takes place in the 1970s basement basketball court (set by David Zinn, with primary-colored gym mats that gave me instant elementary school flashbacks) but the narrator calls upon them as a troupe of actors under her direction, asking others to step into the role of her mother at key points and shifting the other characters in and out of time with the aid of Cha See’s subtle lighting shifts and Palmer Hefferan’s simple but effective sound design.

While Flood mostly plays Lizzie’s daughter playing Lizzie, there are certain moments she can’t bear to embody–a love scene with the man who would become her father, Bill (Charlie Thurston), for example–and others where her longing for her mother subsumes her ability to inhabit her. For those scenes Wohl has the narrator call on other members of the powerhouse ensemble—Kayla Davion’s Joanne, Betsy Aidem’s Margie—to stand in for Lizzie, to allow her daughter to witness as we witness, to step away from the things that make her most uncomfortable. (In these moments, White softens the sharp edges that both Davion and Aidem bring to their primary characters; the two portrayals of Lizzie don’t mimic Flood’s in diction or gesture, but share in her lightness and warmth.) 

When the narrator requests someone else come play her mom in the scene where her father proposes marriage–the scene that ultimately breaks up Lizzie and the group–we presume it will be one of the core crew. Instead, it’s Joanne, who’s feeling “under-utilized,” not really sure whether the narrator has a “plan” for her but in the meanwhile, she “wouldn’t mind feeling how it feels to be in the center of the story.” (Oddly, this moment for me called to mind Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author: a character calling out the way in which the narrative doesn’t make space for her.) Joanne is the slightly didactic face of the women the movement all along neglected: a Black mother of four who can’t go to a meeting on Thursday at 6 pm because that’s when she’s home feeding her kids; she’s the character who fits uneasily into this story because she was always excluded from it on grounds of both class and race. Where Flood’s Celeste wears her cosmopolitanism like armor, Davion’s Joanne cuts straight to the chase, with brisk impatience at others’ gauzy optimism. 

I’ve spent the past few days going back and forth on whether the awkward spotlight (here and in a few other spots) calling attention to the movement’s, and the play’s, inadequacies in dealing with the racial politics that sit uneasily alongside its gender politics is brilliant or a cop-out. On the one hand, having the least-served Black character get her first moment at center stage cosplaying the sweet white heroine at a key moment, even while you’re calling attention to the narrative failures of doing that, feels like a sidestep. On the other, Joanne, embodying Lizzie, recognizes one of the play’s key truths, in a way the narrator is reluctant to. On the one hand, Joanne’s harshly calling out the whole endeavor in the only scene in the play that doesn’t center on Lizzie in either of her forms feels like the bare minimum to do justice to her lived reality; on the other, it’s a clever way to draw the boundaries of what Wohl feels qualified to write, or the story the narrator feels qualified to tell. It’s a gesture of humility, but also falls into the category of not wanting to risk anything to get change, of walking down the middle of the road. 

“If we raise our consciousness, we change the world,” Lizzie says in the group’s first meeting. Then the narrator turns to the audience and immediately undercuts that optimism. And that both-at-once, that doubled viewpoint, is really the point. At one of Celeste’s harsher moments, she tells Lizzie to “Stick to your own story…Stick to what you know.” That seems like a safe choice–but as the group starts to come apart at the seams, we learn how much of their own story each has withheld from the others, too. The group goes on after Lizzie gets married and leaves, but it’s not Lizzie’s story anymore. But it’s her daughter’s act of love, of grief, of despair, and maybe of a little hope that brings us back there. “Here’s my biggest nightmare, let’s do it,” the narrator says. 

And we realize how much the narrator doesn’t know about her own story. Part of what Liberation is about is how opaque our own story can be: Memories we don’t remember. Stories we were only told in outline. Questions we never asked.