Review: 1970s feminists come to life in Berkeley Rep’s highly entertaining ‘Liberation’  

“This is a memory play about my mother, who is … not here anymore,” says the narrator in her metatheatrical introduction to Bess Wohl’s Tony Award- winning play “Liberation.” It is now in a West Coast premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. 

Played with humor and empathy by Katie Lowes, the daughter goes back and forth, throughout the two-act play, from being herself in the present, talking to the audience, but mostly playing her mother, Lizzie, a feminist and consciousness-raising women’s group leader starting in 1970. To be clear, Lizzie is not meant to be Wohl’s mother, not exactly, but Wohl has good insight into what that movement was like back in the day, with all its passion and all its conflicts and all its flaws. 

The daughter always has had the feeling that her mother was not quite satisfied with the way her life turned out—married with children—and was meant for more important things. By re-creating onstage a certain period of Lizzie’s life, she hopes to better understand her mother—and also to better understand why the women’s liberation movement of that era somehow didn’t accomplish all the goals it seemed to promise at the time. 

This is a highly entertaining comedy with a serious theme, and just like the daughter’s judgment of the second-wave feminist movement itself, “Liberation” doesn’t quite meet its goals. But it’s lots of fun along the way. 

At the first meeting of Lizzie’s newly formed, Ohio-based core group—Lizzie distributed fliers to attract participants—the members file in: Susie (Evelyn Spahr) is homeless, living in her car. Celeste (Felicia Curry), a petite, erudite woman with an afro and glasses, lives with her mother, who is old and sick. “She raised five kids and cleaned houses,” says Celeste flatly. She’s the only Black woman in the group and has more than her share of problems in her life. 

Margie (Mary Gordon Murray) is slightly older than the others; her husband is retired and home all day long, so Margie joined the group because, as she says, if she doesn’t get out of the house she might stab him to death. 

Blond Dora (Britt Faulkner) came to the meeting because she thought it was a knitting group. She confesses she’s never had an orgasm. The sympathetic group suggests a solution: Leave her husband. 

Isadora (Irene Sofia Lucio), an Italian immigrant with a husband whom she plans to divorce as soon as she gets her green card, is the toughest, most defiant feminist of the group. She wants to quit talking and do something. By the end of Act 1, she has organized a “strike for equality.” 

By the time Act 2 arrives, three years later, we know and quite like the group members, plus a few others: Joanne (Veronica Otim), who inadvertently wanders in and provides a negative, critical but significant outlook, and Bill, the sole male (Gunnar Manchester). 

It’s rather charming and also silly that the participants—as was common back in the day for groups like this—have an all-nude meeting to confess what they love and hate about their bodies. “I love my brain,” says Celeste. 

These are serious and committed young women, and Wohl gives equal weight to the absurdity and comedy of their political fervor in the pre-#MeToo era (with, unknown to the eager young women, much more angst to come) and to the solemnity of each one’s personal pain. Director Whitney White is deeply respectful of these characters even as she too revels in their absurdities. 

It’s only at the very end that Wohl falls short. The daughter at last says directly to her mother, “I always had a feeling you wanted a different life.” It seems, though, that perhaps the daughter is not as liberated as she’d like us to believe (but no spoilers here). 

Or maybe it just appears that way to those of us of that still-proud second-wave generation. 

Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s “Liberation” continues through Nov. 29 in the Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley; tickets are $32 to $147 at berkeleyrep.org.