Liberation Off-Broadway Reviews

Critic's Pick-- But “Liberation,” which opened on Thursday at the Laura Pels Theater, is neither satire nor agitprop. As directed with cool patience by Whitney White, the better to let its climax sear, and with a cast led by Susannah Flood and Betsy Aidem each at the top of her form, it is gripping and funny and formally daring. In a trick worthy of Escher, and befitting the complexity of the material, it nearly eats the box of its own containment, just as its characters, lacking other emotional sustenance, eat at theirs.

There is little the director, Whitney White, can do to tame the play’s unruly structure, although the dramatic focus grows sharper in the second act, when the agreeably cranky talk begins to turn contentious and more personal. A climactic passage finds the narrator-playwright trying to come to terms with her decisions and those of her mother—whether a fulfilling family life can ever be wholly consistent with a woman’s true autonomy as society is structured, then and now.

Wohl’s writing is sharp and witty, toggling back and forth between humor and heartbreak with natural ease. But given the length of the show, the two acts of the play can feel like they’re spiraling after a while. Even so, the characters are personable enough that it’s easy to get lost in their worries. Wohl’s charming, fourth-wall-breaking lead is played with an endearing desperation by Susannah Flood, who navigates the time jumps between 1970 and the present well. And though she has comparatively fewer lines than the rest of the cast, Kayla Davion’s turn as Lizzie when the narrator needs to take herself out of her mother’s shoes is one of the most powerful scenes in the show.

Her new play—the ambitious, slightly overstuffed Liberation, which just opened off-Broadway at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre—continues her pattern of unpredictability: It’s a memory play of sorts, set largely in the 1970s in a basement basketball court of an Ohio rec center. (David Zinn’s scenic design is period perfection, down to the janky metal folding chairs; you can almost hear the buzzers and smell the stale sweat socks.)

If you were a woman in 1970, by almost every standard, you were regarded as a second class citizen in this country. You could not get a credit card or mortgage without a responsible man to co-sign for you. Abortion was illegal across the land; no matter your education or experience, you had fewer opportunities and were likely to earn less than your male counterparts; and despite all your protests and your dogged determination to gain equal rights, true equality eluded you. That’s the backdrop for Bess Wohl’s beautifully evocative play entitled Liberation. And given recent setbacks for women in the political landscape, this timely work resonates in a deeply personal way.