Interview: Bess Wohl on Writing the Women’s Lib Movement in 2025: 'It's Meeting the Moment'

Who run the Broadway world? Girls. This March, BroadwayWorld is excited to spotlight five incredible female theatre-makers who are changing the game from offstage. In this second edition of 'Female Theatremakers' we are catching up with acclaimed playwright Bess Wohl.

'Female Theatremakers' is sponsored by Roundabout Theatre Company's world-premiere of Liberation. From Tony Award nominees Bess Wohl (Grand Horizons) and Whitney White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding) comes a provocative, revealing, and irreverent jolt of a play about what really goes on when women meet behind closed doors. Liberation - now extended through April 6 only. 

When Bess Wohl started writing plays, she believed they had to be samey; that there had to be some defining quality that would let audience members know it was one of her works.

“It stressed me out,” Wohl recalled. 

Thankfully, she’s long since abandoned that idea. The playwright and filmmaker’s works often examine human connection but through various lenses; love, friendship, family, and most recently, women’s rights.

Wohl, whose “Grand Horizons” was nominated for the 2020 Tony Award for Best Play, recently opened the world premiere production of her latest work, “Liberation,” which was just extended through April 6 at Roundabout Theatre Company’s Laura Pels Theatre. 

“Liberation” marks her first collaboration with director Whitney White. “I hope it’s the first of many,” Wohl said. She added that the “power of community” was strong both onstage and within the Production Team. “She [White] really understands what it means to activate an ensemble of women,” Wohl said.

Interestingly, Wohl and White have Shakespeare in common; both have taken advice from their time in grad school and put it to use on this production.

Wohl had a grad school professor whose rule about Shakespeare and audiences was perspective shifting: “They’re there.” It’s a simple concept that transcends Shakespeare, and that Wohl carries with her in her work. 

“We’re in conversation with each other. It’s an exchange of energy,” Wohl shared of the audience-actor relationship. Choosing to acknowledge audience members instead of pretending they’re not there creates an entirely different atmosphere for those onstage and off.

It’s that principle that Wohl held close as she penned “Liberation.” And now, audiences get to immerse themselves in all that the production has to offer.

The memory play begins with a monologue by Lizzie (played by Susannah Flood) while the house lights are still up and audiences are getting settled. “I’m always jarred as an audience member when plays begin,” Wohl said, describing first moments as “hard to enter.” So in crafting the show’s beginning, she was aiming to create a bridge between the actors and the audience through that monologue. “Plays meet people in real time,” Wohl said. So she was wanting to start the show in the present tense. That’s exactly what Flood does by using that opening monologue to talk about the play’s run time and to crack jokes to ease the audience into the scene. There’s also a subtle undertone about how much space a woman is allowed to take up in the world - further setting the stage for what’s to come.

From an audience member’s perspective, you might immediately wonder how much of the monologue is scripted versus improvised. Wohl said the monologue took some workshopping during rehearsals and was explored in many different ways. “It was my first time using direct address in my work,” Wohl shared. Ultimately, it was Flood who wisely suggested that it might take an audience for the play’s opening sequence to land. And when it did, Wohl was reminded of the impact audiences can have on a moment.

But it’s that Shakespearean rule that guided Wohl to play around with her relationship with the audience in the first place.

Now, Wohl didn’t know when she was writing “Liberation” the climate in which it would wind up being performed. The world premiere production was announced in January 2024 and its opening night was announced a few months later. Wohl knew the world would look different - but none of us could have predicted the dramatic turns ahead. Needless to say, a story about women actively fighting for and making change during the Women's Lib movement of the 1970s hits differently as women’s and human rights are being threatened in the present day.

“It’s been a surprise to me as well how it's meeting the moment,” Wohl said. It’s joy, community, humor, and catharsis.”