Bess Wohl’s “Liberation” has won the Tony Award for best new play — a validation not just of her work but of the discernment of Tony voters.
A playful work of historical reclamation, it re-creates a women’s consciousness-raising group at an Ohio recreation center in the 1970s. The play, which received the Pulitzer Prize this year, was hands down the best work I read or saw since last year’s Pulitzer and Tony winner, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Purpose.” (Both dramas are part of the Geffen Playhouse’s next season.)
But “Liberation” wasn’t a shoo-in, by any chance. The play closed in February, putting it at a disadvantage with Tony voters whose theatergoing typically kicks into high gear in the spring. To make matters more uncertain, Mark Rosenblatt’s Olivier-winning “Giant” and “The Balusters, David Lindsey-Abaire’s satiric comedy on neighborhood politics in an age of ideological guerrilla warfare, had their champions.
“The Balusters,” would be a strong awards contender in any season. As would “Little Bear Ridge Road,” Samuel D. Hunter’s savagely unsentimental study of an estranged aunt and nephew picking through the wreckage of their family history. Hunter’s play had the added benefit of a magnificently calibrated production by Joe Mantello that provided a perfect showcase for Laurie Metcalf’s astringent brilliance. “Giant,” which comes packaged in Nicholas Hytner’s impeccable production led by an unflinching John Lithgow, is similarly elevated by its staging, making it difficult to separate the playwright’s excellence from the director’s.
By contrast, “Liberation,” which was directed with captivating brio by Whitney White, left no doubts about the exceptional quality of the writing. At a time when women’s rights are alarmingly being rolled back, Wohl, who’s only the third solo women playwright to win this award, turned her attention to the generation of women before her — women like her mother, whose unlikely fight for equality revolutionized the world in ways that were hard to imagine back in the 1970s and are still challenging the stubborn patriarchal status quo.
At a time of societal fracture and backsliding, “Liberation” offered audiences the opportunity to commune collectively with a watershed movement. Reminding us of the messy yet necessary work of grassroots activism, the play administered the equivalent of a political oxygen mask. But even more important, it reminded us that history is an indispensable tool for shaping the more equitable future we hope to inhabit.
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