Bess Wohl on 'Liberation'

It took Bess Wohl a long time to write what would eventually become Liberation , her acclaimed play which opened last week on Broadway . After all, she started thinking about making something about the women's liberation movement of the 1970s about 20 years ago.

"I was trying to crack it really not for political reasons, but for personal reasons, for most of my writing life," she says in a recent Zoom call.

Now Liberation exists in a world that has, in many ways, shockingly regressed with the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the rise of "tradwife culture." The circumstances make the work feel more urgent than ever. Still, the production doesn't profess to explain where we are now. Instead, it's a deeply inquisitive look at how we got here.

The play opens with a narrator (Susannah