✰PREMIUM
Bess Wohl: Tony nominee, ‘Liberation’ playwright and Brooklynite

The story is told through the eyes of an unnamed narrator played by Susannah Flood. She struggles to reconcile her mother’s involvement in a consciousness-raising group in the 1970s with the seemingly traditional woman who raised her.

Though Wohl pulled from her childhood experiences in feminist circles in New York City, she wanted to highlight an overlooked history in “Liberation.” 

“There were actually grassroots groups of women who were awakening to feminism around the country,” Wohl explained. “I felt that we had never seen that story. We had seen the coasts, but we had never seen just the everyday women who were all over the country who were encountering these ideas for the first time.”

Because Wohl’s roots are in Brooklyn, creating a true-to-life Midwestern story meant leaning on her creative team and cast. 

“Whitney, our incredible director, is a Midwesterner, and there’s a bunch of people in our cast who are also Midwesterners,” Wohl said. “They all filled in a lot of the details of what it would feel like to be there, to be a Midwestern lady, which is such a particular thing.”

Despite this Midwestern focus, Wohl reflected on her Brooklyn upbringing. She recalled walking over the Brooklyn Bridge, playing in the trees at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, getting rainbow Italian ices in Carroll Gardens and raising a turtle she found in her Cobble Hill backyard.

She reminisced fondly, “It was a very magical childhood living in Cobble Hill.”