Stellar acting in a Women’s Lib play on Broadway

Progress ain’t easy, preaches the new Broadway play “Liberation,” which opened Tuesday night at the James Earl Jones Theatre.

That bittersweet message is a common one onstage. How many issue-based shows have you seen that wrap up with, “And, from then on, the world was perfect”?

Messiness and dissatisfaction abound, here too, and that’s kind of the point. 

But along with the “one step forward, two steps back” takeaway of playwright Bess Wohl’s 1970s-set dramedy comes plenty of hot-tempered clashes, solid jokes and, to ensure no one dozes off, an extended full-frontal nudity scene. 

During that bare-it-all sequence, which some might deem gratuitous, the woman in front of me quite animatedly liberated herself from her seat.

Even if Wohl’s play is overlong and ambles repetitively at times, there’s nothing didactic or “eat your spinach” about the enjoyable and touching story of a weekly women’s group in 1970s Ohio.  

It’s not afraid of fun.

“Liberation” is a “memory play,” we’re told by a present-day narrator, who’s embodied by Susannah Flood with so little artifice that ticket-buyers in the orchestra started having casual conversations with her from their seats. And nobody in the theater seemed to mind the chatter. About as open-hearted as it gets, Flood is simply a marvel here.

Her character tells us she’ll be playing her late mother, Lizzie, in an attempt to understand mom better and figure out what happened to the Women’s Lib outpost she once started from a Midwest high-school rec room. 

A flier brings together domestic Margie (Betsy Aidem), trapped for decades in loveless marriage, New York badass Susan (Adina Verson), straight-shooter Italian immigrant Isadora (Irene Sofia Lucio), black editor Celeste and Dora (Audrey Cora), an office worker who wandered in thinking it was a knitting group.

The members all lead very different lives and, although they agree on their movement’s ultimate goals, they butt heads about the best approaches to achieve them.

Cramming a bunch of archetypes into a contentious weekly meeting is a familiar structure. Two plays last season used it: “English” and “Eureka Day,” both of which were stronger and tighter than “Liberation.” 

Wohl shakes up the old formula some, hopping back and forth through time and adding in revealing sit-down interviews set in the future. A riveting scene in the second act between Kayla Davion’s mysterious Joanne and Charlie Thurston’s Bill, begins with an unexpectedly emotional body swap.  

The hard-to-avoid downside of this set-up, in which everyone operates at their most extreme, is some of the dialogue skews talking-head rather than that of real people sitting in a room together. 

All of the performances are terrific, perfectly pitched by director Whitney White, and the actresses click formidably as a unit. However, as individuals, Susan, Isadora, Celeste and Dora are there, in large part, to deliver punchlines and illustrate points. Two characters are miles more involving than the rest. 

The soul of “Liberation” belongs to Margie and Lizzie.

Aidem’s suburban wife, while representative of a generation of women for whom big change would not come soon enough, packs a wallop as a fleshed-out person. 

During a gutting speech, she lists off her Everest of daily chores at home. Her silent husband doesn’t even know how to make a pot of coffee. And the pain cranks up with every mentioned item.   

And I just can’t lavish enough praise on Flood. The actress, who is always on the verge of a flood of tears, is totally authentic as both a 1970s woman trying to balance risky trailblazing with her own personal dreams — ones that could mark her as a traitor to her cause — and as a curious daughter eagerly diving into her mom’s past. 

The actress is remarkably relatable and empathetic. When her voice trembles, so do we.

At the beginning of the play, when Flood spoke to the audience as the narrator, she started to choke up at the mention of the character’s mother.   

Said a woman seated in the front row: “We understand.”