** Liberation (Broadway) -- extended

On second viewing, just as shallow on a bigger stage

Susannah Flood, Irene Sofia Lucio, Adina Verson, Kristolyn Lloyd, Betsy Aidem, Audrey Corsa in Liberation. Photo: Joan Marcus

(Review of the Roundabout/Laura Pels Theatre production in April ‘25)

They’re so risible, right? Those zealots of Second Wave feminism who formed consciousness-raising self-help groups in the 1970s, hoping to topple the patriarchy. But who’s laughing now?

The audience, sporadically, while attending Beth Wohl’s Liberation, which the playwright subtitles “A Memory Play about Things I Don’t Remember.” That extra bit of remove does not bode well.

The play starts off promisingly enough with a scripted prefatory speech delivered with entre-nous intimacy by reliably charming/offbeat Susannah Flood. She explains that she’ll be playing her own – which is to say, Wohl’s – mother, who in the 1970s spearheaded a feminist self-help group in the basement basketball court of a rec center in Ohio (functional set by David Zinn; appropriately harsh lighting by Cha See).

Let the sessions begin! As the characters coalesce, we get a sampler of types. Among them: a flaky hippie vagabond (Adina Verson), a fed-up lifelong housewife (Betsy Aidem), a displaced Black intellectual (Kristolyn Lloyd), a feisty Italian-born filmmaker marooned in flyover country by a green-card marriage (Irene Sofia Lucio), et alia. They’re excellent actors all (including the three additional cast members) but put to poor use as stereotypes shoehorned into illogical scenarios.

Would a hetero woman back then have hoped to gain blackmail traction by threatening to out a discreet lesbian? “Out and proud” was the rallying cry of the day: it came with bragging rights. And would a women’s group in the heartland have held nude sessions in a public gym?

You’ll have to trust Wohl’s secondhand, likely fictitious account – and choose to discount her understandable impulse to spice up the script. Not that there’s anything louche about this clothes-free meeting. The Act 2 opener — lights up! — proves as staid as the other sessions and merely serves to pad the play’s already overlong 2 ½-hour runtime.

They’re dealing with relatively small-potatoes problems, these flashback women: some flagrant sexist favoritism at work, a husband who refuses to do the dishes – oh, and a marriage proposal. No one seems to be coping with domestic abuse or an unwanted pregnancy. A trauma plot is not de rigueur, of course, but these mini-crises don’t contribute much to the dramatic tension.

From its inception, the Second Wave – though thrilling for those involved – could certainly come across as talky and tedious, an easy target for mockery. Now, however, as renewed objections to women’s autonomy threaten to set us back centuries, it’s galling to see the movement parodied. Five decades later, with surgically enhanced avatars of supposed female pulchritude claiming the spotlight and siphoning whatever power they can from their matching Project 2025 males, it’s truly not the optimal time to lampoon the earnest efforts of actual visionaries, past and present.

Details: Liberation, to February 1