Winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and nominated for five Tony Awards, including Best Play and, for Whitney White, Best Direction of a Play, Bess Wohl‘s Liberation was one of the most remarkable Broadway productions in recent years when it hit the James Earl Jones Theatre last fall, a blend of past and present, laughter and tears, memory and reality, seeking and probity, all layered with the bittersweet realization that sometimes, when reaching toward fulfillment, the reach is the reward.

Certainly Liberation most fully embodies its title in its reaches – the reach of one soul to another, the reach that contains righteous anger, the reach for fairness and equity and the reach, however futile, toward those we’ve loved and lost and want more than anything to revisit and understand.

The setting is an unidentified town in Ohio in the early 1970s, a rec center that plays host to a weekly meeting of seven women, all walks of life, who are intrigued by this new talk of Women’s Liberation and consciousness-raising. So unusual are these pioneers that others in the center assume there’s some sort of knitting circle going on. There isn’t. What’s going on here is nothing less than a sort of nation building, laying the firmament for a new way of living and seeing the world. Even the pioneers have no real idea what they might accomplish, or fail to accomplish, or accomplish and then lose, leaving the group leader’s now grown daughter – in the present day – desperate to delve into that long-ago and find what drove her mother and some wonderful friends to such heights of imagination and camaraderie and foresight, and how the daughter’s own generation has landed in an era where so many of those old hard-fought victories have been peeled away one by one.

In this interview, playwright Wohl and director White have a conversation with Deadline about the origins of the play, its development, what is has to say to the present and about the past, and how a group of woman, ordinary and extraordinary all at once, found their place in a world.

Liberation, a Roundabout Theatre Company presentation, is Tony nominated for Best Play (Bess Wohl), Best Direction of a Play (Whitney White), Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play (Susannah Flood), Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play (Betsy Aidem) and Best Costume Design of a Play (Qween Jean). The play began previews at Broadway’s James Earl Jones Theatre on October 8, 2025, opened on October 28, 2025, and ended its limited engagement February 1, 2026.

In addition to Susannah Flood and Betsy Aidem, the Broadway cast included Audrey Corsa, Kayla Davion, Kristolyn Lloyd, Irene Sofia Lucio, Adina Verson and Charlie Thurston.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

DEADLINE: Bess, tell us how you came to write this play, particularly about your mother’s influence.

BESS WOHL: I have been thinking about this play for a very, very long time. In a way, I feel like I was born to write this play, in that it was partly inspired by my mother, and in particular by the fact that she worked at Ms. Magazine when I was a little kid. In fact, my earliest record of being at Ms. Magazine is as a baby literally bouncing on her knee.

DEADLINE: You were born to this.

WOHL: You know, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t thinking about these things, even as a 4-year-old sitting on the floor of her office as she typed away, playing with non-gender-specific toys, looking at the Wonder Woman pictures on the wall. I was just always in the conversation. I would march in ERA rallies with her, you know? I was aware. I had these Great Women flashcards with Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony. Like, that was what I had instead of baseball cards, you know? So I was always thinking about these things, and then as I got older, and the world moved forward and also backwards in certain ways, I realized that a lot of the questions that she had been asking when I was a little kid, I was still asking in my own life. The ways that she navigated her ambition and her feminism and her life as a wife and mother became questions that I was asking, too. So, I wanted to put a version of myself, a sort of avatar for myself, in conversation with her, and try to sort of dig into some of the things I was wondering about in a very urgent way.

DEADLINE: And Whitney, tell me how you came into this.

Whitney White: It’s funny, I was looking through my emails to really pinpoint the day Bess Wohl came into my life. We started talking, oh my gosh, was it 2023, I want to say? I’m literally looking it up. Yeah, it was after Jaja‘s had opened [Jaja’s African Hair Braiding by Jocelyn Bioh, which White directed], in ’23, ’24, and I actually read her script first, and this was to helm the production at the Roundabout, and I try to read anything I really want to direct. I have to read it first before I meet the person, because I love artists so much, to be honest, and so I have to keep myself honest by really making sure I connect to the work, and so I gave the script a read, and the first read went by like lightning for me, and I’ll never forget how loud the characters were in my mind, how vividly drawn they were. That’s a very rare thing. Extremely rare, when an artist has such a full conceptualization of who the people are, their socioeconomics, their politics, where they’re from, what they eat, what they believe in, you know, what they love and what they hate, and I think that the strength of that point of view drew me into the world. And I’m also from the Midwest, and I was so relieved and thrilled that this woman was looking at a quintessential political time in the American heartland. A lot of people had been struggling for liberation all over the country, not just on the coasts, not just in Ivy Leagues, but regular people, real-world people.

And I was struck by that, and then we had a dinner together, it was our first date, so to speak, and then once I met her and heard her story and her connection to it, I just knew it had to be, and we embarked on mounting it Off Broadway.

DEADLINE: I’m from the Midwest, too. Ohio, actually. Bess, is there a particular city in Ohio that Liberation is based on?

WOHL: You know, I’ve intentionally kept it a little bit ambiguous in the text because I didn’t want to pin myself down too much, I wanted to leave myself artistic license. But I did read an amazing book called Feminism in the Heartland by Judith Ezekiel, and her book takes place in Dayton, Ohio…

DEADLINE: Yes! I knew it! That’s me, born and raised, so I want to talk to you about authenticity.

WOHL: That book really was a huge source of inspiration for me, and I think, as an artist, I wanted to leave some sort of mystery and flexibility and space around it, but, that definitely was a place that was on my mind when I was writing it.

DEADLINE: I was a child in Dayton when this play takes place in the early ’70s, and I have to say you really got it. Those characters, the setting, all seem very familiar to me. It feels very authentic to me. But also what I remember about the subject of women’s liberation then is it being sort of in the culture – on TV, especially sitcoms like All in the Family, and Good Times even had an episode where Florida went to one of a consciousness-raising groups like the one you depict. But a lot of times it was played for laughs. Usually those shows, at least the Norman Lear sitcoms, came down on the side of the women, but the jokes often came at the expense of the women as well. You know, lots of jokes about who wants to wear the pants in the family. Do either of you see this Liberation, in all of its authenticity, as a sort of corrective to that pop culture image we have from that time period?

White: I certainly do, and I think it’s interesting, I always like to take a temperature test when I’m working on something, and I remember asking so many people, hey, what do you know about the ’70s? And so many people would say, oh, That ’70s Show, or all these cliche things, and I don’t know whether that’s a failure of the educational system, or just where the ’60s live in our consciousness, but the ’60s is such a vivid time in the American, kind of, groupthink, but I think that creating a humanizing portrait of women in that time, at least staging it for me, I did feel kind of corrective about it.

Directing this play, I was actively engaged in an effort to show regular, ordinary women as brilliant people who are struggling for personal and political gain, you know? The knitting circle joke, let’s just talk about that, that joke Bess has in Scene 1 is so brilliant. The security guard goes, oh, You’re here for some knitting circle, you know, that these women just meet up and stare at their Ps – I won’t swear – and knit for each other. No, they were teaching each other all these necessary things and survival skills. So I found in the text, Bess was brilliantly humanizing and intellectualizing a very valiant effort that people take for granted and caricaturize.

WOHL: I love that you located that, Greg, because it was very much on my mind as well. You know, in Whitney’s production, obviously, she was so careful not to lean into caricature or sort of “the ’70s” in quotes. But in thinking about just what is a consciousness-raising group, I was aware that there were all of these representations of these silly, sort of played-for-laughs consciousness-raising groups, even in plays that I love, like in Uncommon Women and Others. I think Wendy Wasserstein has a consciousness-raising group, and I love the play, and I love her work, but I was interested in seeing if I could find a slightly more…let’s say, in my version of it, I wanted to invest in the difficulties and the truths and the hard-won victories within the consciousness-raising groups. So, there were moments when I was even afraid of the humor, and I’m a writer who loves to use humor in my work.

But I was afraid to go too funny because I never wanted to be sending them up. I wanted the texture of the humor to be respectful. I wanted us to be laughing with them, rather than laughing at them. That was really important to me, and I think the actors brilliantly found that balance as well, because there’s a razor’s edge, especially in that first scene where something’s really funny like Margie says she might stab her husband to death. And then, a few minutes later, Isidora is sitting there weeping about being trapped in this green card marriage and being afraid she’s gonna get pregnant and not know what to do, you know? And it’s just these really, really, delicate moves that allow both registers of humanity to exist so close to each other.

DEADLINE: I think people who haven’t seen the play might not realize how funny it is. One of the cultural stereotypes of that era, maybe even still today, is that feminists are so serious, they lack senses of humor. Again, Liberation is sort of a corrective to that. Was that in your mind?

WOHL: Yeah, as I said I want to be laughing with them. It’s an interesting thing, right, because they were very funny women, just they themselves had a very, very delightful, delicious sense of humor. You know, Gloria Steinem is one of the funniest people, and when she actually came to the show at the Roundabout, and we very seriously thanked her for her service to humanity, she just kept saying to us, it was fun, it was fun. So we knew that humor and joy and laughing together was part of the Resistance.

DEADLINE: Whitney, how did you bring out that humor in the performances?

White: I am a great student of what I call our grandest tradition, which is comedy performance, which stems all the way back to Black performers on the vaudeville circuit, and to Lucille Ball, and Martin Lawrence and Richard Pryor. We have an incredible history around the rhythm and intellectualization and performance of comedy. And so, I approached this in a very technical way, because there’s all these different types of comedy, right? There’s situation-based, there’s text-based, there’s character-based. And in working with the women, we really tried to identify what was what. For example, when Susannah Flood’s character Lizzie [introduces herself to the audience], I had to rehearse that a plethora of ways to get that, and then pull that back into a humanistic way, right? And so I approached it, like, very consciously, to be honest, and you know my favorite is “Who’s on First.” Do you know “Who’s on First?”

DEADLINE: Of course. Abbott and Costello.

White: One of the greatest. I think almost every play I direct, I make actors watch it, because the rhythm and audacity and comedic control is so incredible. So we watched videos, we watched clips, we discussed what kind of comedy there was and where we found how that was aligned and useful to the text, and not harmful. Again, like Beth said, I want you to laugh with us and not at us. But I would say it was like an academic push, and it was something we all studied.

WOHL: What’s so great about Whitney’s direction in this play is she went all the way into the humor and all the way into the pain. Do you know what I mean? She took it and just, like, stretched it in both directions as far as possible, and I think that’s what really achieved that sort of sense of size and import for the entire piece.

DEADLINE: Without doing spoilers, the scene finally when mother and daughter have the conversation, it’s both funny and it’s sad, but there’s also a sort of wistfulness to it that I must imagine is hard to get on stage. The bittersweetness of looking back, not really being fully able to explain yourself to a younger person and a younger person not fully able to explain herself to the older person, especially when that older person is no longer living, but having to find some sort of bridge. How do you project that on a stage?

White: It’s funny, this is a very brilliant question you’re asking, because I think what drew me to the piece was the intergenerational conversation being had. And I myself, and I don’t want to speak for Bess but I think she is too, we’re both at a crossroads where we’re mothers, and yet we still have parents living. We’re looking forward and back all of the time, and the line of conversation from Audrey Corsa’s character all the way through Betsy Aidems’ character is one that has conflict and love and mothering and siblinghood. And to your question of how we do that, I just kept asking myself the many ways that female relationships manifest themselves. Bess Wohl has been my friend, she has been my sister, she has been my teacher, and vice versa, and I’m gonna bring up a crazy reference, but Natural Born Killers is a film I also watched when I was thinking about directing this, because…

DEADLINE: Okay, I wasn’t expecting that!

White: Stick with me. In that film, a man and woman go through every permutation that kind of relationship can have. Siblinghood, lover, mother, father, all these things. And similarly, female-to-female relationships are just as deep. In the piece, we have a queer love circle, a little triangle. We have a young woman, Audrey Korsa’s character Dora, kind of bucking against a group of older women, who assume that she doesn’t have an inner life and that she shouldn’t even complain about her existence, right? Their relationships as women are extremely, extremely complex and enriching. Bess lets them be complex, full of conflict, and yet full of love. And I honestly just tried to honor that, to honestly let the conflict be real conflict, don’t play it down. Let the love be searing hot, don’t turn the volume down on it, you know? And just turn everything up as much as you can, because I think it takes that much effort for people to understand how complex and deep women are.

WOHL: Yeah, I think yes to all of that. I didn’t know that that [mother-daughter] scene was necessarily where I was going, actually, when I wrote the first drafts of the play. I don’t write with an outline, because I feel that if I’m not making discoveries on the page, as a writer, then the audience won’t feel surprised. The audience won’t be discovering things. So, in a way, I need to sort of know what the questions are that the play is asking, and continue to follow those questions, but I don’t necessarily know plot-wise how the pieces are all going to fit together. So for me, when the character of Margie says that she would step in to be Lizzie’s mother in that moment, I was like, I mean, I really felt stunned. And yet, on some subconscious level, obviously, I had set that up because I had set up the language of actors stepping into other roles. The character Joanne also steps into the role of the mother, and of course, Lizzie steps into the role of the mother in the beginning of the play. So it’s the third time that someone has stepped into the role of Lizzie’s mother, which I think is why, for the audience, it doesn’t feel jarring or strange, because we’ve seen it happen twice before. So dramaturgically, it’s actually sound. But I didn’t plan it in a sort of outline form. I felt like I had created the possibility for it to happen, but when it happened, it almost felt like it was surprising me as much as anyone else. For me and my writing, the moments that are the most successful are the ones where I’m surprised by where the characters are taking me.

White: And that scene is playing on a very tried and true form of spiritualism. You have someone embody someone who is no longer living with us. And there’s so many beautiful references across the world in terms of how different ritualistic spaces inhabit that kind of thing. We just staged it in all those different ways. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I brought up this weird film, Natural Born Killers, because there was a lot of experimentation. You ask us, how do we do it? We work like mad scientists! We change it again and again. I remember one day there was a version of that scene where it was much, much fuller, and Bess would communicate to me what she preferred and didn’t prefer, and then I would bring in research about spiritualism and embodiment and transference and all this stuff, and so we kind of made, like, a little science lab, and we had to try it a lot of ways to find the right balance. You know, I’d give anything to be able to go back to those days when we were cooking in that kitchen together.

DEADLINE: I’m imagining all of you – writer, director, actors – in this room together that’s not unlike what we see on stage with the women in the consciousness-raising group.

WOHL: It definitely did occur to me, as we were rehearsing, that we were our own consciousness-raising group in the rehearsal room. And then it occurred to me, once we were in the theater, that the play plus the audience was another consciousness-raising group, that the group kept getting larger and larger, because obviously the point of theater and art, at least in part, is to raise people’s consciousness, right? To create a moment of awakening, to have people leave the theater seeing each other differently than they did on the way in. So, I think, to your question, there was a sense in the rehearsal room that a group of performers was forming something that was not totally unlike the consciousness raising group of the play, and they were supporting each other. They were sharing stories of different things that had happened in their lives, funny, traumatic, everything. The ones who were mothers, some of them were pumping in the dressing rooms, and they were watching each other’s baby monitors while the other one was on stage. They’re still great friends and a great ensemble, which is why it was so special to be able to bring every single one of them from Roundabout [Off Broadway] to Broadway. I don’t want to speak for them, but the sense that I have from seeing them together is that, in the same way that I based this on a real group of women who have been together through life, I would not be surprised if this group of actors is together in different ways through life.

White: I’ve really been reflecting on what has made this journey so unforgettable, and you brought it up yourself, Greg, when you used the A word – authenticity. In rehearsal, what mirrored the play was an authentic experience of becoming a community. That was a real thing. It wasn’t fake. There’s something at the heart of the process that definitely infected our relationships, and like Beth said, it will stay with us for life.

DEADLINE: Are you surprised at the way this play and this production landed, in terms of… Oh, wait, I didn’t even say congratulations, Bess! You just won the Pulitzer Prize! Congratulations. Congratulations to both of you, because I know the prize goes to the author but Whitney you helped bring the play to life.

WOHL: Oh, it’s a group effort.

DEADLINE: So were either of you surprised at the impact?

White: I’m gonna be honest, I am not. Even the first draft. We had several workshops before we even went into rehearsal. I read so many scripts and it’s very rare to have a two-act Grand American play with as much history, research, point of view, and political awakening as Liberation. I was like, if we can just keep going, I know everyone is gonna see and experience what I experienced on that first read. I don’t mean that in a egotistical or cocky way, I just mean, quite honestly, as someone who studies literature and great American drama, all the pieces were there. We just had to get the story out there.

DEADLINE: Bess, is it too much of a pat on your own back to answer that question?

WOHL: No. I was just reflecting, first of all, Whitney, thank you for saying all of that, that’s really beautiful. And I think there’s different layers to how I feel when I put a piece of work out into the world. There’s part of me, when I’m writing, that has to trick myself into thinking that no one is ever gonna see this, and we will never do it at all, or I couldn’t take the risks that I take on the page. You know, for example, with the nude scene at the beginning of Act 2, if I had started down a path of, like, what are we asking actors to do here? And how are we gonna do it? I think it would have blocked me. I had to kind of create an imaginative bubble where there was total freedom and no one was ever gonna know about it except for myself.

But as the play met the world, I think there was a little kernel inside of me that felt that there was something very special in my collaboration with Whitney, in the story we were telling, in the actors we had cast, and that me feeling that it was incredibly special didn’t necessarily mean that the world would meet it with that reception at all. I mean, it’s definitely happened to me before that I think something’s incredibly special, and no one else seems to agree with me. So I’m just so still surprised and grateful that the play was seen and received in this way, and it’s been beyond what I ever could have imagined.

DEADLINE: I do want to get into some of the things you both have coming up. Liberation is going to be in London, and on the road. I’m wondering how involved will the two of you be in all of that?

White: Very involved, sir! Come on, this is our baby we’ve made, sir, we’re not just gonna send it off to college without packing lunch, you know? We’re going to begin a casting process together, and our version of the show, because it’s going to be going out in the world as it should, but our version of the production will go to Berkeley Rep, and then the Geffen Theater, and a few more will be announced soon. I don’t want to spoil it. And we’re gonna rehearse for a couple weeks in New York, and then we’re gonna send it out. We really care about audiences seeing great theater across the country. Neither of us are, like, coastal snobs in this way. Like I said, I’m from Illinois, and I want everyone to experience the work like it’s opening night on Broadway. I think everyone across the country deserves that, so we’re gonna be very involved, and also, we’re going to take it to London. It’s just incredibly exciting.

WOHL: And I’m really interested to see this play is a conversation with the audiences. It’s also such a conversation with the moment, right? I could never have anticipated when I wrote it how unfortunately, in many ways, relevant this play would be. I didn’t know we would be living through such a difficult and painful moment for so many people, and women in particular, so I’m really curious to see how does this play live differently in California, in the Midwest, in different parts of the Northeast? You know, I think the conversation will continue to evolve as events in our country evolve, and as we sort of hit different areas of the country. I think that’s gonna be really, really fascinating.

DEADLINE: Whitney tell us about the other projects you have cooking right now, at least two or three major things. The Whoopi Chronicles, Imitation of Life…

White: The thing I want to talk about is Schoolgirls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play coming to Broadway [performances begin September 8 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre] and I bring that up not because I don’t love all of my other children equally, but I think the through line from Jocelyn Bioh to Bess Wohl and back and forth is, like, very close to me and my heart, to be honest. They’re both playwrights that I love very much. In fact, we’re going to an event tonight that Jocelyn is moderating for us at the Drama Bookshop, and I’m gonna try not to cry through the whole thing. I just bring up Schoolgirls because that’s a Broadway revival, and we need to be reviving more female work on Broadway. I can’t wait for Bess to revive her own work on Broadway. I think that reviving plays codifies a play in the American conscience forever, for the rest of our lifetime. Every time you see Death of a Salesman or whatever, that means that it’s buying that another lifetime of study, and I think Bess’ plays and Jocelyn’s plays deserve that, demand that. And so Schoolgirls is on my mind today, because it’s another step towards a female voice being with us forever.

WOHL: I’m so excited to see Schoolgirls. And I am excited to get back to writing. To be honest, I have a few projects that are in different stages of readiness. I have some readings coming up of new work. It’s funny because I was listening to someone talk recently about writing a play, and she was saying that, like, you get to the top of the mountain with one piece, and then it’s not like you start your next climb up from there. No, you go back to the bottom of the mountain. Lisa Kron was talking about this, to give her credit. So I’m going back to the bottom of the mountain. And I’m excited.