'Liberation' Broadway review — an essential, tour-de-force memory play

Read our review of Liberation on Broadway, now at the James Earl Jones Theatre after an award-winning premiere with Roundabout Theatre Company earlier this year.

Summary

• Liberation follows a feminist group in the 1970s as well as the daughter of its founder as she looks for answers about her mother decades later
• The show features a strong cast; writing; and direction
• The show is recommended for fans of woman-centric theatre and the cast of stage veterans

There is something different about Liberation’s Broadway production. Bess Wohl’s play still features the same tight ensemble as in its Off-Broadway premiere earlier this year, and it is still directed by the unstoppable Whitney White. It still sings and soars in Act 1 and then punches you in the gut in Act 2. And it is still essential theatregoing this Broadway season.

But there was just something different off Broadway: The basement theatre at Roundabout Theatre Company made you feel like you were in the 1970s rec center basement in Ohio where the play is set. While David Zinn’s set is compellingly realistic (especially the white brick walls, which took me right back to elementary school), the Broadway production of Liberation feels bigger in a way that doesn’t necessarily serve the story. The cast hams it up for the space as the audience spews laughter back. The play hasn’t changed — it is still one of the best confrontations with the scope and limits of memory and the memory play itself in recent, well, memory — but its presentation has.

The memory play is an oft-misunderstood form, with many playwrights throwing their self-insert characters into chaos without serving their own plots. The self-insert character needs to enhance the story, not detract from it; some stories of what happened are more interesting than the fact that they happened to a particular writer’s parents or siblings or friends. Wohl’s play achieves the most delicate of balances, with the brilliant Susannah Flood’s Lizzie serving dual purposes. She is herself, her mother, the playwright, and a stand-in for a 2025 audience of dejected liberals all at once. Breaking her own rules as a good journalist, Lizzie is the story.

Liberation comes to a head when 1970 Lizzie’s fiancé, Bill (Charlie Thurston), inadvertently reveals their engagement to the feminist consciousness-raising group she first organized in that rec center basement three years before. Everyone is stunned and stung — the refrain “Whatever you do, do not become a wife” echoes from Act 1. The present-day Lizzie wonders what made her mom give up her dedicated feminist mission in favor of a life of apparent servitude (Wohl and her characters are forthcoming, not reductive, about the way childcare falls on women’s shoulders, even in relationships that are ostensibly equal).

Is Lizzie ashamed of her mother’s choices, just as Lizzie-as-her-mother is too ashamed to tell her friends about her relationship? The more urgent question is why Lizzie thinks so little of her confidantes, regarding them as caricatures incapable of thinking independently about her personal life. Is this just how Lizzie imagines the misfit group reacting to her mother’s supposed betrayal? In this moment, is she Lizzie the organizer, or Lizzie the lost daughter, caught in a wave of misunderstanding?

Liberation doesn’t answer. Lizzie’s final confrontation with her mother’s spirit is disappointing not in performance, but in the platitudes offered, the meek reassurances. We cannot know what our lost loved ones would tell us about their lives or ours, just as we cannot know the moment the trajectory of our society was lost. Perhaps it is not one climactic moment, like in a history book, but the small and normal ones bound together, rec center basement meetings included in the spine.

Liberation summary

Liberation follows Lizzie, a journalist and the organizer of a new consciousness-raising women’s liberation group in 1970 Ohio. The group meets weekly to discuss how to enact the goals of the second-wave feminist movement.

The group also includes Margie (Betsy Aidem), a housewife who resents her hapless husband; Dora (Audrey Corsa), who initially attends a meeting by accident but is soon consulting the group for career and romantic advice; Celeste (Kristolyn Lloyd), a Black feminist scholar who has temporarily moved back to her hometown to take care of her ailing mother; Susan (Adina Verson), a queer Jewish writer living in her car with her pet bird; and Isidora (Irene Sofia Lucio), an Italian immigrant and aspiring filmmaker who married a man she dislikes to get a green card.

Lizzie frequently steps out of the group to address the audience directly as Lizzie's daughter, trying to understand how her mother went from a feminist organizer to a woman who fulfilled traditional gender expectations in marriage. She interviews the women from the group after her mother’s death to ask them why so many feminist ideals have not yet been achieved.

What to expect at Liberation

Liberation runs approximately 2 hours and 30 minutes, including a 15-minute intermission. The second act opens with an extended, non-sexual nude scene in which the women of the group try to embrace body positivity by holding their meeting naked. To protect the privacy of the performers, the house management team places each audience member’s phone into a secure pouch that can only be unlocked by the theatre staff upon leaving the performance space.

Liberation contains discussions of sexual assault, misogyny, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and violence.

Throughout the show, Lizzie addresses the audience directly, sometimes responding to people’s reactions in real time. These interactive moments give Liberation the cozy feel of a real rec center basement meeting.

What audiences are saying about Liberation

Liberation has an audience approval rating of 88% on the review aggregator Show-Score.

• Show-Score user Kendra 6325 calls Liberation a “funny, moving, highly relevant play.”
• Critic Sara Holdren called Liberation the best play she saw in the 2024-25 season in a review of the Off-Broadway premiere.
• Show-Score user Alina 1322 writes, “I know this incredible play will stay with me for a while.”

Read more audience reviews of Liberation on Show-Score.

Who should see Liberation

• Off-Broadway regulars will recognize Flood’s extensive resume — The Comeuppance, Staff Meal, Plano — and want to see her latest star turn.
• Fans of Broadway’s Prayer for the French Republic from the 2023-24 season will want to catch Tony Award nominee Aidem’s turn as Margie, a frustrated housewife rediscovering her sense of self.
• Fans of feminist and woman-centric theatre will appreciate Liberation's nearly all-female team on and off stage.

Learn more about Liberation on Broadway

Liberation is a tour-de-force exploration of how everyday moments make up social movements.

Learn more and get Liberation tickets on New York Theatre Guide. Liberation is at the James Earl Jones Theatre through January 11.

Photo credit: Liberation on Broadway. (Photos by Little Fang)