"Though not listed in the program, Liberation, an inventive and resonant new play by Bess Wohl, possesses a subtitle: A Memory Play About Things I Don't Remember. The line presumably refers to the personal nature of the show, based in part on the life of Wohl's mother, Lisa Cronin Wohl, who worked for Ms Magazine in New York during Wohl's early years, but it also applies to the conversations at hand, within a women's lib group in small-town Ohio, 1970."
"On the basketball court of a local rec center, six women hit the blinkered beats of second-wave feminism workplace inequalities, consciousness raising, The Feminine Mystique that many in the audience will only know secondhand, through family histories, re-creations like FX's superb series Mrs America or inherited cultural shorthand. I, like Wohl like anyone born after Roe have only inherited memories of this stage in the fight for sex and gender equality."
"There's often a tone of light derision applied to second-wave feminism, whose white, upper-middle class limitations were glaring even if its aims were noble, albeit tragically fragile. Lizzie, an adult woman of our times, seems to know this. She's played, by Susannah Flood, as anxious, apologetic, eager to over-explain; she addresses the audience first as a peer, with the lights up, the required sealing of phones acknowledged, the fourth wall unbuilt."
The play reconstructs a women's liberation group meeting in small-town Ohio in 1970, staged on a rec-center basketball court. Six women debate workplace inequalities, consciousness-raising, and The Feminine Mystique. The narrative blends personal memory and generational perspective, tracing a daughter's attempts to understand her mother, who sewed costumes, cooked meals, and worked at Ms. Magazine. The production juxtaposes light derision of second-wave feminism's class and racial limitations with sympathy for its aims. A character named Lizzie inhabits multiple roles, addressing the audience directly as anxious and over-explanatory while collapsing the fourth wall and reanimating past conversations.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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