Philadelphia Theatre Company and Baltimore Center Stage present Bess Wohl’s Liberation

This is the world that Lizzie (Julianna Zinkel) and her friends contend with as they establish a consciousness-raising group in the basement of a smelly, bleacher-lined suburban rec center. (Sasha Jin Schwartz did the veristic scenic design, evocatively lit by Krista Schwartz.) This is the world that her daughter—also named Lizzie, and also played by Zinkel—tries desperately to understand decades later, after becoming a wife and mother herself.

A sensational debut

Bess Wohl’s topical dramedy caused a sensation when it opened at New York’s Roundabout Theatre early last year, earning critical plaudits and quickly moving to Broadway. The play won the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award in quick succession. PTC’s mounting, produced in collaboration with Baltimore Center Stage, is the first of many regional productions set to unfold around the country this season.

It’s easy to see why Liberation has found such success, particularly here under Taibi Magar’s vivid direction, and realized by a talented cast of Philly and Baltimore-based actors. The experiences endured by Lizzie and her cohort are, to borrow a modern word, eminently relatable even to contemporary audiences.

Relatable today

Many women will empathize with Dora (Campbell O’Hare), who finds the road to her professional advancement scuttled by unqualified men. Or to Margie (the impeccable Susan Rome), who feels that little of herself remains after 45 years of housewifery. Or to Celeste (Ciera Gardner), who lives at the sometimes-uncomfortable intersection of Blackness, queerness, and womanhood.

Wohl’s work is at its best when it delves into the messiness of activism and self-actualization, two of the play’s overarching themes. Lizzie the elder proves a fascinating and frustrating case study in not always practicing what you preach. The inheritance she left her daughter—as a journalist who worked for Ms. magazine before seemingly giving up her professional ambitions—casts a complex specter over the action. So too does the behavior of Dora and Isidora (Lee Minora, broadly comic), who use their looks to curry favor with men in a manner that leaves the other women uncomfortable.

White feminist focus

Liberation has its ignorant spots too. As in real life, white feminist narratives minimize the role of Black women in the movement; despite Gardner’s strong performance, Celeste remains thinly drawn in the script. Another Black character, Joanne (Noelle Diane Johnson), calls Lizzie on her implicit biases, but she’s also used in a way that absolves Lizzie—and, by extension, Wohl—of those oversights.

The script’s strongest moments thrive on nuance, yet there’s still a fair amount of clap-and-snap dialogue design to elicit an easy audience response. And while a much-discussed scene that involves the characters meeting together in the nude has its grounding in history, it’s hard to avoid the lack of body diversity on display.

The work continues

Yet Wohl’s slice of historical life still resonates, not least because it reminds us how far we still have to go. In 1973, when the second act is set, Roe v. Wade has legalized abortion; when this play premiered in 2025, the right to abortion care had been overturned. The Equal Rights Amendment, invoked in the final scene, still isn’t a reality.

I thought too about the only other play I know in which consciousness raising figures significantly into the action: Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles, from 1989. Besides Liberation, it is the only other work written by an American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Best Play.

We still have work to do.

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