Theatre in Review: Liberation (James Earl Jones Theatre)

	Susannah Flood, Betsy Aidem. Photo: Little Fang

The good news: Liberation -- to my mind, the best new American play of last season -- has transferred to Broadway in tiptop shape. The even better news: It has arrived with its superb cast intact. And, eight months after it opened at Roundabout Theatre Company's Off-Broadway venue, the questions it poses have only grown more pertinent.

Bess Wohl has given herself an extraordinarily difficult task, executing it with an agility that makes her the playwriting equivalent of a Flying Wallenda: She puts a version of herself at center stage, trying to imagine a women's encounter group, based somewhere in Ohio, in the early 1970s. It was a real thing, she notes, started by her mother, a fact she finds nearly impossible to credit. Did the homemaker who oversaw every moment of her childhood -- down to the last meal, piano lesson, and school play -- really once challenge the patriarchy? How to square this with the woman she seemingly became? And how is it that, everywhere she looks, it feels like "somehow like it's all slipping away?"

The play leaps nimbly back and forth in time, as Lizzie (the playwright's mother), a journalist trapped on the small-town weddings-and-obituaries beat ("Every day, I'm just hoping that someone will die in an interesting way, so I'll have something to write about.") attracts a diverse, yet equally dissatisfied, cohort. Under Whitney White's direction, each is perfectly portrayed: Audrey Corsa as pretty, shy Dora, a secretary at a wine and spirits company, quietly fed up with playing handmaiden to the office troglodytes; Kristolyn Lloyd, wide-eyed, wary, and buttoned-up as Celeste, a book editor making a forced return home to nurse her failing mother; Irene Sofia Lucio, the mistress of uncomfortable truths as Isadora, an Italian filmmaker stuck in a green-card marriage; and Adina Verson as Susan, a Marxist refugee from the New York radical scene and aspiring lesbian biker. Keeping tabs on them all is Susannah Flood as quizzical, nonplussed Lizzie, and as her nameless daughter who, looking on, struggles to understand what these women achieved and why it seems so ephemeral today.

In this company of equals, the effortless standout is Betsy Aidem as Margie, a middle-aged housewife whose marriage has become a form of jail. Her sons having grown up and moved on, her husband treating her like an unpaid servant, she sits on a volcano of unexpressed rage. Yet escape seems impossible; as she notes, "I've never paid a bill. I don't have a bank account. I can't drive." (She can, however, lay waste to her china cabinet, in a spectacularly destructive display that somehow fails to get her spouse's attention.) Aidem makes Margie the group's in-house prophet, a living model of the road not to take, warning against choices that, all too easily, will leave them irrevocably compromised.

Liberation is a piercingly accurate snapshot of a time when everything was up for grabs, yet satisfaction remained frustratingly elusive. Or did it? Wohl's characters take action, joining strikes, fighting back on the job, and gingerly joining in a nude encounter session. Assumptions are shaken, and lives are forever changed. But old habits die hard, especially when Lizzie's fiance, long kept under wraps, is exposed, as is an affair between two members of the group. It's an exhilarating, confusing, frightening moment: Freedom is in the air, yet opportunities come with plenty of strings attached, and progress is often hard-won and sometimes difficult to define.

Seen a second time, two sequences stand out. The first features Kayla Davion as Joanne, a passerby who volunteers to take over the role of Lizzie in scenes depicting her courtship with Bill, her gallant, if slightly traditional, lover. A Black woman, Joanne notes pointedly, "I wouldn't mind feeling how it feels to be in the center of the story." Davion deftly catches Lizzie's panic when marriage, an establishment she wants fundamentally altered, if not abolished, is suddenly on offer from someone she loves. Later, talking about the scene with Lizzie's daughter, she notes that Bill represents "the kind of love that shatters everything." "I don't know," the daughter replies. "They didn't seem so in love when I was growing up." "Nobody seems in love when they're raising children," retorts Joanne, earning the biggest laugh of the night.

But the emotional capper comes when Aidem, stepping into the role of the older Lizzie, engages her daughter in the conversation they never had, noting that maybe she is asking the wrong questions and adding, "It was a huge problem for us, the having you, the raising you, and the way you took so much for granted and let so much slide -- not just the political progress but the community -- the solidarity." The scene is delicate yet powerful, loaded with unspoken emotion. It is also the key to the play: Liberation comes to the same conclusion as the women's rights musical Suffs, seen on Broadway not too long ago: Freedom, in the form of real political power, must be relitigated daily lest it be lost. Look around you and see.

The rest of White's production is equally on point, beginning with Charlie Thurston as Bill, who is either the love of Lizzie's life or a vexing problem she doesn't know how to solve. David Zinn's Ohio school gym set is exactly right (take it from this Midwesterner), Cha See's lighting keeps track of the play's time jumps and shifting emotional tones, and Palmer Hefferan and Ben Truppin-Brown's sound design includes a kicky hit list of tunes by The Supremes, Led Zeppelin, and others. Best of all are Qween Jean's costumes, an extensive collection of period styles, thoughtfully crafted for each character and topped by Nikiya Mathis' equally detailed wig and hair designs.

Liberation is a potent exercise in time travel to the era of Betty Friedan and Ms. Magazine, George McGovern and Richard Nixon (the latter included in a showstopping revelation), all presented without a whiff of nostalgia or condescension. It is a Janus-faced drama, looking to the past to understand what is happening today, seeking to articulate what needs to be done if generations of progress aren't to be consigned to the ash heap of history. The lessons are there, if only we can listen.--David Barbour