It's only a few minutes into Bess Wohl's Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning play Liberation that you realize that the main character is going to be doing triple duty as fourth-wall-breaking narrator, as herself somewhere in the present day, and as her own mother Lizzie in early 1970s Ohio, before she was married with children.
The play goes on to treat time and the characters themselves with sublime fluidity, allowing Lizzie to be both her mother and herself within the same beat, allowing two other actors to take on the role of her mother at other points in time, and as if stepping in and out of a documentary frame, letting Lizzie glide between the present and the past, speaking to the same character at two moments 50 years apart.
Director Whitney White's stellar production that began off-Broadway and transferred to Broadway last season has arrived fully intact at Berkeley Rep, kicking off its first tour with two cast members from the Broadway run.
The play centers on a consciousness-raising (CR) group that begins meeting in a rec center basement in 1970, somewhere in Ohio, led by Lizzie (Katie Lowes, whom audiences may recognize from Scandal and The Hunting Wives) — a woman in her 20s working for the town newspaper who wants to learn new paradigms for how to exist in the world as a woman, and how to fight back against the oppression that has been baked into the system.
The core members of the CR group, Lizzie and five other women of different ages and backgrounds, will continue meeting at this subterranean basketball court every week for a number of years, something that Lizzie's daughter is trying to recreate and imagine for herself, given that her mother was nowhere near this radical and unconventional by the time she knew her.
The eldest of the group, Margie (Mary Gordon Murray), is arguably the emotional center of the play, describing her miserable, suffocating home life, a post-Betty Friedan housewife who feels powerless to change her life apart from maybe getting her retired husband to do one or two chores.
Celeste (Felicia Curry), is a Radcliffe-educated Black writer who has landed back in Ohio to care for her elderly mother, and who felt at home in radical circles while living in New York. Isadora (Irene Sofia Lucio), is a brash Italian immigrant who insists she only got married for a green card, and can't wait to leave her American husband.
Dora (Britt Faulkner) stumbled into her first meeting unaware of what it was, but finds that it helps her stand up to her boss at work and ultimately get promoted. And Susan (Evelyn Spahr), or Susie Hurricane as she introduces herself, is a passionate force to be reckoned with, versed in Marx and early feminist theory, who is living out of her car when the show begins.
What transpires between the women is often funny, often contentious, and meant as a microcosmic glimpse of the grass-roots efforts of second-wave feminists around the country. Their struggles, including access to abortions, laws around no-fault divorce, and discrimination in the workplace, begin to be addressed in the larger culture in the ensuing years of the 1970s, due in some small part to their own activism. But still, there are fights, there are people the movement leaves behind or shunts aside, and there is, in the case of Lizzie, the conflict of still having a part of herself who wants love, and a husband, and even kids, despite all the patriarchal oppression that will entail.
Wohl insists that the play is not autobiographical, of either her or her own mother, and yet this all feels intensely personal — in particular the desire to understand one's mother, who she was before you were born, who she may have wanted to be had you not been born.
The play also deftly addresses two of the key criticisms of second-wave feminism through a seventh female character, Joanne (Veronica Otim), namely that it didn't make room for people like working mothers who didn't have the luxury of time to attend CR groups or march for equality, and that Black women who had already fought for civil rights for decades remained a minority whose concerns were not centered by the movement.
As if commenting on Betty Friedan, Joanne quips, "I worked outside the home my whole life. I would welcome a chance to stay home with the kids. Make me a rich housewife, lord. My god. Give me that struggle." She also notes how the CR meeting was designed to exclude people like her, because what mother has the freedom to attend a 6 pm weekly meeting on a school night?
What makes Wohl's play extraordinary is how it is able to touch on so many points like this without feeling didactic, and how it is able to give each character their own arc within the confines of the rigid framework of play told through a series of group discussions.
In the printed version of Liberation, it is subtitled, "A memory play about things I don't remember." But by the end, we have a sense that this act of creation is still one of the best documents, fictional or otherwise, that will be likely get of this period of our history, of this particular moment in a centuries-long struggle.
Wohl says she wanted to illustrate "how conflict can be productive, and how we can continue to have solidarity in spite of conflict, or even because of conflict sometimes." Liberation does this many times over, and like equality, it is no easy feat.
'Liberation' plays through November 29 at Berkeley Repertory Theater. Find tickets here.
