"What happens when a group of people gather in a room and really listen to each other? That may sound like an ordinary enough act, and as you walk into the James Earl Jones Theater, you might find yourself deceived by David Zinn's 1970s basic gym basement of a set, or by Susannah Flood's hand-holding introductory address to the audience-fear not a long running time, she says, standing in for the playwright Bess Wohl, all those six-hour plays are by men who didn't have children."
"But talk, as simple as it sounds, can be transformative, which is the point of the consciousness-raising group Wohl's work revives onstage, and a quality that Liberation bears out in performance. Both times I've seen the play- Off Broadway this spring, now returning in a larger space on Broadway-I've felt unprepared for the emotional wallop it lands, the way that Wohl's work becomes cosmically immense without leaving that gym basement."
Liberation stages a 1970s gym-basement setting and a playwright character revisiting suburban Ohio feminism through memory-play devices. The play revives consciousness-raising groups as a radical act of listening and turns simple conversation into transformative, emotionally powerful revelation. The work shifts genres, blending veiled autobiography and staged memory while remaining physically contained. Intimate staging and focused attention on women talking create a cosmically immense effect without spectacle. The structure invites the audience to engage in careful listening and suggests that sustained, attentive exchange among people can change participants profoundly.
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