By Erin Flynn Jay<\/p>\n
What did women\u2019s liberation look like in the 1970s \u2014 and what does it have to say to women today?<\/p>\n
Those questions are at the heart of ‘Liberation<\/a>,’ Bess Wohl\u2019s acclaimed play making its Philadelphia debut this fall as Philadelphia Theatre Company opens its 52nd season.<\/p>\n The play, which won the 2026 Tony Award for Best Play and the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, moves between the early 1970s and the present day. It follows Lizzie as she pieces together a previously unknown chapter in her late mother\u2019s life: her involvement in a consciousness-raising group in small-town Ohio.<\/p>\n Directed by PTC Co-Artistic Director and Obie Award-winning director Taibi Magar<\/a>, the production is the first in the country following the play\u2019s Broadway run at Roundabout Theatre Company.<\/p>\n For Magar, bringing the play to Philadelphia was an opportunity she did not want to wait on.<\/p>\n \u201cIt’s one of the greatest plays of the 21st century and it just became available for regional theaters to do it,\u201d said Magar. \u201cI felt a real sense of urgency in bringing it right away.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Looking back to move forward<\/p>\n When Lizzie discovers that her mother was a radical feminist in the 1970s, she begins to uncover the complicated history of a movement that fought for greater freedom and equality for women.<\/p>\n The play\u2019s consciousness-raising group becomes a window into that history. The women speak openly about work, marriage, motherhood, race, desire, ambition and freedom, forming unexpected friendships and solidarity along the way.<\/p>\n However, ‘Liberation’ doesn\u2019t present the women\u2019s movement as a simple story of progress.<\/p>\n Magar said Wohl\u2019s play explores both the achievements and shortcomings of the movement, including the ways Black women and queer women were sometimes excluded from the conversation.<\/p>\n \u201cI love that Bess also acknowledges the way that the movement failed, the way the movement did not always include Black women or queer women,” Magar said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI love when plays carry you back in time through a significant point of history,\u201d she continued. \u201cIt happens to be a history that I didn’t know very well. I learned more about Black civil rights than I did about the women’s liberation movement.”<\/p>\n The play was written in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court\u2019s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women\u2019s Health Organization decision<\/a>, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Magar said that context gives the play an added sense of urgency<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cShe (Wohl) frames the play to go back in time and understand what that’s like because it feels like it’s all slipped away,” said Magar. \u201cBess was writing this after the Dobbs Act, and I think that has a real pressure on the play. Of all the progress we thought we made in the women’s liberation, why does it feel like it’s all slipping away? Why does it feel like we are having to fight again for the things we thought we already won?\u201d<\/p>\n Magar also pointed to the renewed cultural conversation around traditional gender roles as another reason she believes the play resonates now.<\/p>\n \u201cAs we prepare for the election cycle to start and as we continue to unpack why trad wives are back, there’s a real urgency to bring this play right here right now,\u201d Magar said.\u00a0<\/p>\n A conversation \u2014 and a challenge<\/p>\n While ‘Liberation’ looks back, Magar said the play is ultimately less interested in nostalgia than in asking audiences to consider what has changed and what has not.<\/p>\n The women at the center of the story wrestle with questions that can feel both specific to their era and strikingly familiar today.<\/p>\n \u201cIt’s like a lived experience because you’re watching it and you get to understand the urgent questions they were really wrestling with and the ways that they succeeded,\u201d said Magar.<\/p>\n “It’s written so beautifully. The characters are so gorgeously vivid and complicated. You feel the power of what they did, and you feel the limitations of what they did,” she added.\u00a0<\/p>\n A performance without phones<\/p>\n