Did you knit your scarf? A woman asked me while we were waiting in the line for the restroom.
No! I wish I could, but I don’t know how to knit, I answered.
You should join the knitting club, she said smiling as after a good joke
I prefer the other club, I replied, making her laugh.
We have both just seen Liberation by Bess Wohl, a production of Roundabout Company, which is the story of six women attending in the 1970s a consciousness-raising group sometimes confounded with the knitting club, as they were both held in the basement of a gym somewhere, in a small town in Ohio, USA.
Liberation starts with the lead actress (Susannah Flood) addressing the audience directly, mainly to comfort those who are affected by the fact their phones were closed in special pouches so nobody can use them in the hall room. In a very Brechtian moment, that will be followed by a few others along the night, she also explains (acting as the playwright) that she started the research for this play trying to understand why her mother, who founded this group in 1970s to raise the feminist consciousness of other women, has in the end chosen to lead a very conventional life, getting married and raising a family. The same actress, who is the playwright’s alter ego, is playing the mom in the show. Jumping from the meetings of the women in 1970 back to the present, she is bridging two moments in time and in connecting them she says she want to understand why exactly “they failed” (meaning the failure of the liberation movement). Which make one think: isn’t placing the fault on the shoulders of the women instead of the society exactly what we need to avoid?
Bess Wohl’s play was everything I needed: when I saw it with my friend A. I was struggling (I still am) writing an academic book titled Performing Womanhood in Eastern Europe – crazy topic in the aftermath of Trump re-election in January 2025 when the already started massacre of progressive ideas and laws was (still is) advancing at unprecedented speed. Women’s rights? Equality? What are you talking about? Shut up and bow your head, your nostrils make you look like an angry horse! No, wait, this is a line in the play, not my own words.
But the thing is I do feel like an angry horse looking at all what women have painfully achieved over so many decades only to lose it again! And how does it help to look back when you see that all the progress one generation makes is met with backlash and sometimes entirely lost by the next generation? It is the same in USA as in my part of the world, Eastern Europe – you know, that place where the “unnecessary war” is fought by a former empire trying to raise from its ashes feeding itself on the small nations around it. Say Ukraine.
Back to Liberation: why do I relate so much to these American women meeting in 1970, as they are remembered by the daughter of one of them? This tentative “theatre of memory” speaks to me because I work with archives and I am investigating stories of women in Eastern European theatre – their lives and careers struck from the official history or at best barely mentioned. There is something liberating in seeing this group of women on stage, all typologies based on the author’s interviews with real women whose anonymous existences are now brought to life to help us – their daughters – survive these times, if not finding new hope for systemic change. It is moving to see many of their thoughts and feelings are similar to the thoughts and feelings of their peers across the ocean. Liberation proves it is possible to close the gap between West and East, in terms of feminist ideas and lived experience of womanhood, and to do it on stage!
A member of The Civilians, an American group known for documenting their work in the communities they are making theatre about, Bess Wohl (author of plays such as Grand Horizons, Small Mouth Sounds and Make Believe) based Liberation on her own mother, who worked at Ms. Magazine (founded by Gloria Steinem). She told Brooklyn Rail magazine that she investigated how feminism took hold beyond the big city in America, how one could find like-minded people in the absence of social media. In fact, she did much more than that, carefully crafting a fabric made of different points of view of women – white women, black women, straight and gay women, immigrant women, all-ages women – showing us how an awkward first meeting can move towards a valuable intersectional conversation, if we really listen. We witness in real time how this fictional network of support is born and we are remined the value of solidarity in beautifully written scene after scene, acted by an extraordinary cast. The dialogue is authentic, unpretentious and funny, so we are moved as well as entertained. An Obie and Lilly Award winning director, Whithney White, associate artistic director of Roundabout Company is not trying to unify the female experiences, but to create space for each of the women on stage to tell her story. She challenges the audience when she directs a black woman to play the playwright’s white mother in one of the scenes and she also surprises with a scene played in the nude, as a set up for a necessary, if hurtful discussion about how women feel about their own bodies. As I felt the audience – mostly women – laughing and taking long breaths and applauding full-heartedly, a sense of togetherness settled, like I was part of something bigger and certainly beautiful. We were all enjoying the way these “small histories” were integrated – knitted? – in the bigger history of a movement. When all is said and done it is reassuring to be reminded that women have their own ways to find the power and agency to resist patriarchal systems and their stereotypes and build their lives as they see fit.
As one character says, „Self-determination has to be balanced with community.”
“Every story is a brick in the wall,” says the young woman/alter ego of the playwright in the end and then she addresses the audience one last time: “Yours too!”.
How do I feel about this ending?
Hmmm
Why bricks?
Why a wall?
This is such a male metaphor: construction, architecture, structure…
Why not “every story is a knot” in a fluid, ongoing scarf collectively knitted by all of us, women from the East to the West? Or the other way around.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Cristina Modreanu.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.
