Liberation

(Photo credit to Mark Garvin.)

Feminism is something that has no boundaries.  It has been handed down from generation to generation, has changed a million times, and still lives on as a belief today.  Everyone views it differently, even if they’re in the same room at the same time.  And that is exactly what we got with Liberation.  Bess Wohl’s daring play gives us something that we’re seeing on stage, but could easily be your college feminist group, or a small meeting in a basement bringing together women with different beliefs.  And that second one is what Liberation gives us.  Six women, all with different approaches to feminism (although some may not have known what they were getting into), and what this group becomes.

To begin with, we get some framework.  We see one of the woman’s daughter breaking the Fourth Wall to explain to the audience what’s going on.  She goes on to take on her mother’s role…and so, we have Lizzie.  Lizzie was the one who started this group, hanging up flyers and arranging their space in the basement.  Five women answered the call.  And as we get to know these women, we can see that maybe they’re not all as different as they seem to be at first.  Slowly but surely, connections are made and relationships form.  It becomes something really beautiful.

Lizzie’s daughter is the one grounding everyone both in the present and in the past.  In the present, she’s interviewing these women that her mother knew so well.  In the past, she takes on the role of Lizzie.  It was a really interesting duality.  It’s pointed out to us that some of what she’s been told is wrong.  Which brings up the idea of storytelling.  Stories get handed down, but it’s like a game of Whisper Down the Lane.  Things change, some people get to speak and some people don’t get to speak.  We see different perspectives in the past, but does Lizzie’s daughter really get the accuracy of the stories?

Either way, these six women met for years in a basement.  They may have had their differences, but they definitely loved each other enough to continue spending that intimate time with each other.  They wanted to make the world a better place for themselves, and they did that through empowerment.  Both their own, and everything that they learned from each other.  Sure, things got pretty awful at times, but in the end, they had each other.  And I think part of Lizzie’s daughter’s motivation was to try and understand that.  As someone who has been a part of feminist groups, I know how they get.  And I would love someone to ask me about that in thirty years.

Along with that, we see a lot of “stereotypes”, which I say like that because, although there are stereotypes of women in Liberation, these women are also extremely unique.  You had your butch woman, the ditsy blonde, the black lesbian academic…these women were exactly who you would expect to show up to a meeting like this.  But that’s also just how they’re seen.  The ditsy blonde had the best ideas.  The old housewife has a dark edge.  None of these women were who they appeared to be to the world.

And yes, what we’ve all be waiting for…the nudity.  We got a lot of warnings about that with this show, and I honestly had no idea what to expect.  It’s like in Hair, where they warn you about nudity and you just sort of see everyone naked for a split second before the lights go out.  But Liberation not only had full nudity, it had a full scene where all six main characters were nude.  It was extremely interesting, seeing how each woman sat in her nudity.  Some of them were actively trying to cover themselves.  Some were just sitting.  Some were uncomfortable, even though they were trying to be comfortable.  It was a really stunning scene.  The naked body usually makes me feel pretty uncomfortable, but this scene was beautiful.  I loved it.  It was a true look into these women that we already know so well.

Liberation brought up a lot for me.  I was in a feminist group in college, took a lot of Womens Studies classes, etcetera.  And I could see a lot of the women I knew on stage.  I think about how much of a disaster my feminist group turned into.  We had all those stereotypes.  The butch lesbian, the women who hated men…any group with strong ideals gathering together can be tough to deal with.  Like in Lizzie and Bill’s relationship in the play, there’s a lot more to being a feminist than what we’re often fed.

I think my favorite take away from Liberation is about the choices we make.  We can love ourselves and others, or we can push them away.  We can be happy with a group of true friends, or we can find ourselves wanting more.  These women all made choices, whether it was stuff we saw on stage or off stage.  It’s in the stories that Lizzie’s daughter is hearing.  These women all made choices, and they’re all choices they have to live with.  Whatever that means for them, whatever that means for the people around them, they’ve all made a choice to be who they are and to live strongly with that.