Bess Wohl was told many times that her play Liberation would never see the light of day. In a time when many theatres are tightening their budgets and producing smaller, shorter plays, Liberation is massive in scope. “​​It’s two acts, there’s an intermission, there’s seven women in it (six of them get completely naked),” explains Wohl. “This is not the play that you write if you cynically just want to get produced.”

But it was the play Wohl felt like she had to write, and had been trying to write for 15 years. Her gamble paid off. After an Off-Broadway run earlier this year, Liberation has now transferred to Broadway to unanimous rave reviews; it’s running at the James Earl Jones Theatre through January 11, 2026. The play takes place in a high school gymnasium, where a group of women meet weekly at the height of the second wave feminist movement. At these meetings, which were called “consciousness raising” sessions, they discussed their growing frustrations with the inequality they faced and how they could make small changes in their lives. Wohl was inspired to write the play by her mother, who worked at Ms. Magazine in the ‘70s, as well as her mom’s friends. 

“I liked the idea of this group of women meeting with the idea that if you change your life, you can change the world,” Wohl explains. “A small moment of change in your life, even something as seemingly mundane as getting your husband to do the dishes, might have a ripple effect to the entire world.” 

Other small moments dramatized in the play include women speaking at length and uninterrupted, and the aforementioned nude scene—where the women discuss what they love and hate about their bodies (something that actually happened in real-life feminist meet-ups). Liberation is filled with lines that reverberate with their simple truths: "a woman speaking uninterrupted is a radical act" or "self love is an act of liberation."

READ: Irene Sofia Lucio Wore a Cast of Her Own Bust to the Liberation Opening

Liberation also allowed Wohl to ask her mother some questions that had been nagging at her, especially as the rights that had been so hard-won by previous generations of feminists (such as abortion rights) have been rolled back. “I grew up going to Ms. Magazine with my mom, when I was little. Even from a child’s point of view, it felt like the world was changing, and that there we were on the precipice of a really new understanding of equality and freedom and justice. And now, of course, we’re in such a challenging moment with regards to so many things. And so, I had the question of what happened, what did we miss? What went wrong? … You know, grappling with all those questions, and then also grappling on a more personal level with: Did my mom live the life she wanted?”

Granted, all those questions, Wohl admits, are unanswerable (her own mother even told her so, saying, "We can never know what the other road would have been"). And audiences going to Liberation won’t find easy answers. Notes Wohl with a smile: “I love to start a play with an unanswerable question and then fail at answering it over the course of the play.”

But based on the unanimous rave reviews on Broadway, audiences will enjoy the journey. That’s how director Whitney White felt the first time she read Liberation. Wohl had cold emailed her, after seeing White’s work on Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, another play with women talking about their lives. The two met up at Dumbo House and immediately hit it off. White had been a fan of Wohl’s other plays. Upon reading Liberation, she immediately loved the richly drawn, smart, funny characters, women who she herself wouldn’t mind spending time with.

“It’s a beautiful, quiet snapshot of ordinary women who take personal risk for political gain: standing up to your boss, writing a book about things you really believe in, deciding between love and the movement … I find them to be so brave,” she explains. “And I was like, maybe doing this play will make me a little more brave.”

Having White alongside her also helped Wohl expand Liberation past her viewpoints as a white woman who is married to a man. The play also includes queer characters, Black women, and immigrants—voices that have historically been pushed to the margins in the fight for equal rights. 

"I brought in stuff about Angela Davis, stuff about queer, Black feminist movements that were also in dialog with Gloria Steinem—she was not the only one, right?" says White. "I think it is a signal of Bess' brilliance that she was able to capture, to encapsulate these differences." 

Wohl points out that it was just as important for them to have diversity behind-the-scenes as well—Liberation's costume designer is Qween Jean, who is trans and Black, while its lighting designer is Cha See, who is Filipina. "Whitney uplifts every single voice in the room. There is no one who doesn't contribute, and there's no one whose contribution isn't valued," enthuses Wohl. "I think for me, as the writer, I'm always bound by the limits of my own self, my own experience, my own imagination. And then I rely on this incredible team of collaborators to tell me: 'This is how it feels. This is what resonates. This is what doesn't.' And we work on it together and make something that's so much better than anything I could conceive on my own." She then marvels, "That's kind of the great alchemy of theatre."

While Liberation doesn’t answer the question of what people today can do to fix this messy world we’re all living in, it does provide important bits of wisdom. As one character in the play points out: "Why are you asking what we did wrong? Instead of asking what's wrong with the world?"

Notes White: “Past generations had a lot less, and they were willing to sacrifice a lot more to get advances for us all. Here we are in this time where we’re losing freedoms all the time, civil liberties all the time, and it’s like: At what point are we willing to start having hard conversations, and give up the safety our capitalist liberalism affords us, for better change?”

In a world where isolation has only increased, and with conversation now becoming combative instead of constructive, Wohl’s play is reminding audiences that the key to collective liberation begins with a single step: coming together in person and talking. As White notes: “If you suffer in silence, nothing will change. So, the voice is a tool.”

The play even locks audience members’ phones into Yondr pouches—to protect the actors during the nude scene, and to foster in-person dialogue. As Wohl puts it: “[Liberation is] about community and the power of community. And there’s fewer and fewer places to find that. And I think the theatre is one of those places where I still go for that.”

So for those taking a seat at Liberation, expect provocative, eye-opening conversations, tears, and also, crucially, laughter. As White sums it up: “Fun is not a crime. And this play, while it is political, it is radical—it’s not medicine. It’s a good time.”

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Photos: Liberation on Broadway

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