\u2018Liberation\u2019s\u2019 take on the women\u2019s right movement<\/p>\n
The Philadelphia Theatre Company has ties to New York and Broadway. Magar had directed plays in New York before co-leading PTC, and the theater has developed works with Broadway aspirations, such as \u201cThe Tattooed Lady.\u201d<\/a> \u201cNight Side Songs,\u201d<\/a> which PTC premiered in 2025, opened off-Broadway earlier this year.<\/p>\n Magar is working with Broadway star BD Wong to develop a new version of Tennessee William\u2019s \u201cGlass Menagerie,\u201d which will premiere at PTC next spring.<\/p>\n But \u201cLiberation\u201d came out of the blue.<\/p>\n Magar went to New York City last year with her husband and co-artistic director Tyler Dobrowsky to see the play with no intention of bringing it to Philadelphia.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are really good friends with the director of the original production, Whitney White,\u201d Magar said. \u201cWe went to support her and sort of stumbled into: \u2018Oh my god, we have to do this play.\u2019\u2019 And then: \u2018Oh my god, I have to direct it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLiberation\u201d is set mainly in a basement gym in Ohio in the 1970s as a group of women meet weekly to discuss women\u2019s rights as a personal goal and a social movement. It is loosely based on the playwright, Wohl, who wanted to investigate the life of her own mother, now deceased. The play jumps in time from the 1970s to today, grappling with the successes and failures of the movement.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s deeply funny. I think it\u2019s deeply engaging. I think it\u2019s incredibly moving and wonderfully insightful,\u201d Magar said. \u201cAnd really singular. You don\u2019t encounter plays like this. I feel like it\u2019s made its own world. The way that it\u2019s talking about women in the \u201870s and now is so incisive.\u201d<\/p>\n Neither Magar nor Wohl was alive during the second-wave feminist movement. But Gayle Smith was. She is a retired attorney who saw \u201cLiberation\u201d in New York and said it rings true to her experience as a young lawyer in the 1970s.<\/p>\n \u201cAbsolutely true,\u201d Smith said. \u201cIn my second year in law school I got married in Florida and I went to the grocery store and to cash a check. I had an ID for law school and I kept my maiden name. They told me that I didn\u2019t have the proper ID and that my husband would have to approve my check. This was 1973.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI remember being involved in a class-action case where I was the only female,\u201d she added. \u201cI was arguing a case and the judge looked at me and said, \u2018Miss Smith, you\u2019re almost at the end of your argument. But I couldn\u2019t deny such a pretty face. I\u2019ll give you a few more minutes.\u2019 All I could think of is: \u2018Okay, shut up and just finish your argument.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Smith is a supporter of Philadelphia theater, generally, and Philadelphia Theatre Company in particular. She is an honorary producer of \u201cLiberation\u201d at PTC and urged Magar to direct the show as soon as possible.<\/p>\n Smith said it is both sad and poignant that \u201cLilberation\u201d opens five weeks after the death of Gloria Steinem, a towering figure of the feminist movement central to the play.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was a feminist, but I think what people forget is she was a civil rights activist and a humanist,\u201d Smith said of Steinem. \u201cShe fought so many battles. This show shows a lot about not just the women\u2019s movement, but about human rights and how we need to work together. I don\u2019t think that we understand the value of that.\u201d<\/p>\n During the run of \u201cLiberation,\u201d the lobby of PTC will have displays detailing how the women\u2019s rights played out in Philadelphia. The theater company has partnered with Women\u2019s Way, a Philadelphia nonprofit for women\u2019s equity, to display artifacts from its archives. Women\u2019s Way is now celebrating its 50th anniversary<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cGirl from the North Country\u201d runs at the Arden Theatre until Oct. 25. Philadelphia Theatre Company\u2019s \u201cLiberation\u201d runs Oct. 9\u201325 at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018Liberation\u2019s\u2019 take on the women\u2019s right movement The Philadelphia Theatre Company has ties to New York and Broadway.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":300071,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[45582,8232,69,71,70,31962],"class_list":["post-300070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-arden-theatre-company","tag-broadway","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-philadelphia-theatre-company"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}