BUZZ OF BROADWAY

The Brilliant ‘Liberation’ Sheds Its Clothes to Get to the Naked Truth

The sensational Broadway play titillates in more ways than one.

When Susannah Flood first appears on stage in Liberation, it is in the guise of Lizzie, the author of the play we are about to watch. We immediately like her; she seems gently scatty as she addresses us, commiserating over how long the journey to get there may have taken us, the importance of getting candies unwrapped, and the most burning question: How long is this thing?

Then she takes a beat, and we subtly enter the frame of the play; she begins to talk about grief and loss, her voice clots, and so fast has the audience been beguiled that one softly sympathetic voice rings out from the front of the orchestra, as clear as a bell as Lizzie struggles to articulate her tangle of feelings: “We understand.”

That turns out to be a meaningful response. At least at my performance of Liberation—a Roundabout Theatre Company production now on Broadway after a critically acclaimed off-Broadway run earlier this year—the murmurs of recognition (as well as much laughter) emanating from the audience were a constant. This fizzingly vibrant ideas’ play seeks and elicits that level of interaction from the audience—particularly the women watching. A lot of truths are being told, and they are clearly being appreciated, heard, and inner-echoed.

This excellent, affecting play (James Earl Jones Theatre, booking to Jan. 11, 2026) is itself based in a crucible of personal-is-political talk—a women’s consciousness raising group in the early 1970s, before Flood in her modern-day guise as Lizzie was born. Her character’s mother set the group up, and soon enough Flood is playing Lizzie’s mom, bringing the group together in an Ohio school gym (evocatively realized by designer David Zinn).

Directed with a vivid fluidity by Whitney White, and with costume design by Qween Jean and hair and wig design By Nikiya Mathis, we feel—just as we did when Liberation played Off-Broadway—absolutely “back there” with these women. Within the group, Margie (Betsy Aidem) is a housewife of too-many years, whose husband notices very little, until she resolves to make herself noticed—but to what end, she comes to wonder. Dora (Audrey Corsa) initially thinks she is there for a knitting circle, decides to stay, and then plucks up the courage to confront sexism in her workplace.

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Celeste (Kristolyn Lloyd) is a professionally successful Black woman who has returned home to care for a sick mother. Isidora (Irene Sofia Lucio) is seeking liberation from an arranged marriage.

Susan (Adina Verson) is also seeking revolution, on the streets and also via the freedom of her motorbike. Joanne (a standout Kayla Davion) comes into the gym searching for her son’s backpack, and ends up—very wittily—puncturing some of the group’s lefty wholesomeness. She also plays Lizzie’s mother at the moment of meeting her dad (Charlie Thurston). Lizzie says she cannot play her meeting her dad for the first time, because that would be “too weird.”

Davion looks out to the audience, one of two Black actors in the show, to say she hasn’t had that much to do as yet (her hard stare elicits a gale of laughter), so she’d be glad for something to get on with. She and Lloyd later talk about Black women’s relationship to feminism, itself complicated by this play being written by a white woman.

That the play acts as a play, then has its actors leave their own 70s-characters to comment on it, or to play another version of someone else, returns it again to a forum-of-ideas space, a piece of art in overt discussion with itself.

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The play speaks to itself, it speaks to us, and it encourages a dialogue straight back at it. In this sense, it is its own highly effective consciousness-raising exercise, looking at us in our present day where the principles of equality and progress are becoming derided and imperiled. What the women thought they were confronting and vanquishing in the early 1970s remains all too prescient.

Liberation’s real playwright is Bess Wohl, who recently told American Theatre, “The play came from this very deep and real question I’ve always had for my mother. Which is: ‘Do you regret having me? Do you regret taking a slightly more traditional path than might be what you would have originally imagined for yourself?’”

Her mom, Lisa Cronin Wohl, worked at Ms. Magazine in the 1970s. “That question was something that I always had in the back of my mind: how she was navigating being a mother, being a wife, and also being a feminist—how did that all go together?”

The play features one scene that means all phones are locked away in Yondr pouches—all the women get undressed, as happened in some consciousness raising groups at the time, to discuss how they feel about their bodies.

“For me, all of the complications of feminism are in that nude scene,” Wohl told American Theatre. “Because, yeah, it’s titillating, it’s entertaining, it’s shocking, it’s whatever you’re feeling. And we haven’t moved beyond that—we haven’t moved to a place where a woman’s body is not a point of a lot of interest.”

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The discussion between the women is so rich, funny, sad, and revealing that the impact of their nudity recedes to almost-nothing. Just as with everything else in this play, you are immersed in the push-pull of debate, disagreement, accord, discussion, revelation, pensiveness, salty humor, barbed backchat, secrecy, and truth-telling.

Liberation has a lot to say about careers, motherhood, sexuality, independence, harassment, equal pay, and workplace mistreatment (and many other things besides), but it is resolutely not a pamphlet or polemic. Its arguments about women’s place, power, and agency are rooted not just in experiences, but in questions—some of the answers to which emerge, while others remain elusive.

All of the women have their moments of drama and discovery, but it’s perhaps Aidem who we feel most attuned to—both in her faltering and alternately very funny, very charged path to self-realization, and in the wisdom she imparts to others, particularly when she comes to inhabit Lizzie’s mom in a final scene which brings the spirit of a dead mother and a living daughter together. There are more questions and answers shared between them, but the play meaningfully doesn’t end there. The discussion, its discussion, remains potently ongoing.

Tim TeemanSenior Editor and Writer

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