Bess Wohl is thrilled that her new play, Liberation, is getting people talking. Not just about the play itself—though its lens on a women’s liberation group in 1970s Ohio is both compelling and rife with parallels to the present day—but also because, with everyone’s phones locked in pouches for the duration of the show, there’s nothing else for audiences to do besides, well, talk with one another. “The number of people who have told me during intermission, my mother or my daughter, we had a conversation that we had never had before. It’s so incredible,” she remarked.
Wohl, the playwright behind works like Grand Horizons, Small Mouth Sounds, and Make Believe, was inspired to write Liberation because of her mother, who worked at Ms. magazine when Wohl was young. In the play, Lizzie (Susannah Flood) steps into the past to try to understand her mother’s choices, playing her as she organizes a local consciousness-raising group while also breaking the fourth wall to speak to the audience in the present...READ MORE