Liberation is a play that made Bess Wohl a Pulitzer and Tony laureate. The play won the 2026 Tony Award for Best Play, and Wohl herself won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Liberation takes us back to 1970, when a young Ohio newspaper reporter named Lizzie organizes a women’s consciousness-raising group in the basement of a local recreation center. Lizzie wants to change the world, but the other women have some more immediate concerns, like surviving their marriages, getting ahead at work, and figuring out what they actually want from life.
The group includes an older housewife who has spent 45 years looking after her family, a young woman who keeps losing promotions to less competent men, a lesbian radical, a Sicilian immigrant trapped in an unhappy marriage, and a Black academic who discovers that the problems facing white women are not necessarily the same as her own.
Their weekly meetings become increasingly candid, covering everything from sex and marriage to racism, motherhood, career ambitions, and the frustrations of living in a society where men make most of the rules. There are disagreements, revelations, and occasional moments of absurdity. At one meeting, the women even decide to strip completely naked, hoping to overcome their embarrassment about their bodies and free themselves from conventional standards of beauty.
The play also has another dimension. Fifty years later, Lizzie’s daughter is attempting to reconstruct her mother’s past and understand how a passionate young feminist eventually settled into a rather conventional domestic life. She is also puzzled by the fact that her own generation is still struggling with many of the same problems.
The play moves back and forth between the two generations, examining both the accomplishments and the disappointments of the women’s liberation movement. The central question is not simply whether the women changed the world, but whether they managed to change their own lives.
It had its Philadelphia premiere this month. The Baltimore Center Stage group will stage the same production January 16 – February 7, 2027.
The actresses in this scene are, from left to right across the stage, Lee Minora, Anna Faye Lieberman, Ciera Gardner, Campbell O’Hare, Susan Rome, and Julianna Zinkel as the Beaver.
These images have been enlarged and enhanced by AI. The video, however, is right out of the cam.
This is (obviously) a third-party effort. I’m not in Philly, and haven’t been there since the 1960s. To cite the urban legend version of W.C. Fields’ tombstone, “Better here than in Philadelphia.”
Have to admit you did a good job with the AI on the image. Thanks
The AI was very… generous… with the women’s bodies and faces. Looking at the images made me want to watch the video. Watching the video made me want to bleach my eyes.
The images were small, so the enlargements are approximate.
There was a previous run of this in NYC earlier this year with a different and a bit more attractive cast.
I read a review of that version, by a man, who was disappointed the women were naked. He was bummed they were “giving up their agency”:, to which in my mind (and likely the minds of the stage actresses he was referring to) I thought, what a complete douchebag. Guy was probably hetero, too. Lol.
I digress.
That reminds me of some commentary I received in reply to one of my own comments in a Reddit thread earlier this year discussing nudity in films where a person expressed exasperation with my attitude saying ‘don’t you understand how damaging nudity is?’. ‘Damaging’? Really? Why not beautiful and natural? There is, unfortunately, an attitude of new prudery that is prevalent among some progressives (though definitely not all of us) that is as wrong-headed as the traditional prudery and does no favours to anyone. A woman (or man) who willingly and happily displays their body for reasons of artistic or sexual expression, or other reasons, is very much showing agency.
I prefer to stick just with the video rather than the AI ‘enhancements’. It is nice to see all that female nudity on stage. These women are not fashion models, but that is just fine by me – I love the looks of ‘everyday’ women as well. My one complaint is that given that this is supposed to portray events happening in 1970, the women are not as bushy as they almost certainly would have been back then. It is a bit hard to see given the poor quality of the video recording and that much of the time the women sit with their legs crossed, but my impression is that most of those pussies are trimmed or even heavily trimmed. That is not historically accurate. And also it s not as attractive in my books.
AI gave Zinkel a micropeen or a giant clitter… It’s difficult to tell which.