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Liberation Is the Best Play I’ve Seen This Season
Bess Wohl’s latest is drawn from the true stories of her mother’s 1970s encounter group.
Wohl should be a part of the conversation when we talk about Annie Baker or Jackie Sibblies Drury, writers at the top of their craft who are similarly preoccupied with how the permeable, malleable dramatic form can crack open painfully tender questions of how we treat each other, at both the micro and macro ends of the spectrum. Susan (Adina Verson) lives in her car, writes radical Marxist tracts on napkins, and is “burnt the fuck out” on women’s lib: “Like, I don’t even know what to say anymore,” she growls, leveling a stinging dart from more than half a century ago. They enter the stage charged up and ready and, under Whitney White’s assured direction, proceed to summon and surf a growing wave of charisma, camaraderie, tenderness, and tension — all dynamos and all generous, from Verson’s scrappy, surly, covertly sensitive Susan to Lloyd’s exacting, self-contained, deep-feeling Celeste, a volcano of a woman exerting immense energy to keep from erupting in a way that she can’t control.
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