Teaching Artist Leah Reddy spoke with playwright Bess Wohl about Liberation.
Leah Reddy: What is your theatre origin story?
Bess Wohl: The first sparks of my interest in theatre came when I was quite young. I grew up in New York City. I'm from Brooklyn, and I was lucky enough to be taken to the theatre a few times as a very young child. In particular, my grandmother took me to see Peter Pan starring Sandy Duncan. I must have been three or four years old, but I remember very vividly that at the end of the show, she flew out over the audience and it was just the most thrilling thing I had ever seen in my life. That image of Sandy Duncan flying out over the audience affected me in a very deep way. I wrote her a letter and then she wrote back to me and sent me her headshot, and I just suddenly felt like this is what I want to do with my life in some way.
Then I started performing. I started performing in my church choir musicals, and I started performing in the school plays. I just really sort of caught the bug as a performer, but I was also writing and just knew that theatre was something that I just had this very deep feeling of connection to. But I didn't really think I could make a living or a life in the theatre for a long time. It took me a while to understand that this could be a valid career choice and not just something that I loved.
LR: Were there any significant either teachers or experiences in your artistic life?
BW: There’s so many. I think the experience of performing in these church choir musicals was part of it. We were in a gym, we had this choir leader named Narcissa Titman who was incredibly enthusiastic about these shows that we would put on. It was a highlight of my year every year to do these shows in the gym. As I got older, I was able to study theatre. I went to Yale Drama School, and there I feel like I really found my community and found other artists who have remained friends to this day.
I have an MFA in acting from Yale. But while I was there, I started writing plays for this student-run theatre called the Cabaret. My classmates acted in them. Being in a community of actors, putting on our own shows and being able to write for specific actors and the feeling of being able to offer an opportunity to someone and to see somebody in a way that they had never been seen before - that was really thrilling to me.
So in a sense, my classmates at Yale were mentors to me in terms of helping me go where I wanted to go. Then as I started being produced, people who ran theatres who took a risk on producing my work early on - like Jenny Gersten at Williamstown, Carole Rothman at Second Stage - they really had a huge impact on helping me believe in myself as a playwright.
LR: You've written plays on many different subjects. What was the spark of inspiration for Liberation?
BW: Liberation is a play that in different forms and iterations, I've been trying to write for probably 10 or 15 years. I grew up with a mom who was involved in the second wave [of feminism]. She worked at Ms. throughout large part of my childhood. And so I was involved in the ideas of second wave feminism from a very young age. I had the non-gender specific toys, and I would wear sort of gender-neutral clothing. I had great feminist flashcards of Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth, and I knew who these women were and I was interested in them and sort of idolized them from a young age.
As I got older and became a writer, I just felt like, "Oh wow, I really want to tell the stories of this time. I really want to see if the things that feel interesting and relevant to me might feel interesting and relevant to anyone else." Because it comes from such a personal place for me, even though it's not autobiographical in any way, I don't know what others will think of it. I don't yet have a sense of how it'll be experienced by other people. And what's so exciting about doing this world premiere at Roundabout is opening my little box of anxiety, questions, and interests to the world, and saying like, "Is anyone else thinking about these things?" So that's kind of part of what making the play feels like to me.
LR: You used some non-fiction sources in your writing process. Can you tell us about that process?
BW: The play, while not documentary or autobiography or memoir, does have some antecedents in real life and some sources of inspiration. I did a lot of research. I've worked with a company called The Civilians in New York. They call themselves investigative theatre. And I think I learned partly from The Civilians how to go out and talk to people and interview people and just have a curiosity about what their story might be. So when I was thinking about writing this, I knew that I didn't want it to be limited to my story and my experience. I wanted to find out more. I started a series of interviews with women from the second wave, in particular, a group of women who had been in a consciousness raising group together.
It was during the pandemic, I just started Zooming with them, asking them questions, talking to them. I didn't record the Zooms because I didn't want to make them feel self-conscious or uncomfortable, but I took handwritten notes if something stood out to me. That provided a sort of foundation for the play. There's no one in the play that's an exact character of someone I spoke with, but there's sort of little glimmers of inspiration or there's things that I've recontextualized that somebody might've said to me that just sort of stuck in my head. That became really this very fertile ground for me to start to build something or grow something on.
That piece of it was really helpful and helped me feel that the characters were more real. Then I also did just research, reading books, reading old feminist periodicals, looking back into the 70s, which is partly when the play takes place. And then I also looked at feminist writing now to try to understand how the conversation has evolved, because audiences are going to be bringing their 2025 selves to this play. Then I talked to my own mom a little bit about what her experience was and what she felt. And so there's a lot of different layers of research.
Sometimes I've had experiences where I've started researching something and I just never write the play at all because I'm just mired in research, and it starts to feel like this sort of overwhelming ocean of things that the play can just never do justice to. I think you have to be careful to do the right amount of research, but also maintain a kind of freedom within it. This is a work of imagination. This is not a documentary. These are not real people. These are characters that I've created in my mind, and I know enough to be inspired, but I don't know so much that I'm in a state of paralysis about ever writing anything. And that's sort of the sweet spot I try to find with my research.
LR: This is a world premiere production. How do you approach being in the rehearsal room as a playwright?
BW: It's different with every process, and it's different with every director. Some directors are very eager for the playwright to participate in a very vocal way. Some directors feel that they'd prefer to have offline conversations with the playwright, not in front of the actors, and sort of maintain their rhythm and their momentum with the actors without the writer always chiming in, which I totally understand. In either case, I try to be there as a resource and not as a distraction. I try to keep my attention on the story of the play and on the making sure that the language of the play is adequate to tell the story and support the story.
How can I make sure that we're lifting the things that we want to lift and that the audience is getting all of the information that they need at the right times? Am I tracking that character correctly? Do we have enough points in the path so that when they come in in act two and say this, I understand how they got there from act one? I'm sort of trying to make sure that the architecture is correct. And what's really fun is being in rehearsal and having new things emerge in the play that I didn't necessarily see or intend. And then being able to respond and say like, "Oh, that's actually more interesting than what I originally thought this was." It lets me add a little bit of text here or there to lift that idea or support that idea and create as much texture and nuance and complication and all of that good stuff as I possibly can.
LR: What advice do you have for new or emerging playwrights knowing that some of our audience may come to playwriting later in life?
BW: I came to playwriting not late late, but I had a first career as an actor before I became a professional playwright. I'm very supportive of people coming to playwriting whenever it appears in your life. I think the first thing you have to do is just start writing. I used to have a sign over my desk that just said, "Write something." Sometimes that's the most obvious advice and the hardest advice, "Just write something." And then once you have something, you can start sharing it with people, hearing it out loud, getting some friends together and reading it and talking about it, bringing it into a class.
Actors often are generous with their time about reading new work and have interesting things to say about it. And they read. What's great about sharing work with an actor is they read a lot of scripts. Actors read actually many more scripts than other writers do because they're getting incoming scripts all the time for auditions. So I think the first step is just generating something and then starting to share it and hear it aloud, and then you can sort of refine it and get feedback and decide, start to figure out what it is. Then once you do that, I think the third step is sharing it with outside of your little group of trusted confidants, whether you share it with a theatre, somebody that you might not know but you get it to them or you self-produce it and share it with an audience. You experience that and it goes well, or it goes badly. And then you have to start again and write a new something and do the whole thing over again.
I think one thing that probably might be heartening to people beginning is that no matter how many plays you've written, when you start a new one, it sort of feels like you've never done it before. And you're just really trying to figure out what is the form of this particular thing and how does this story want to be told? How can I invent a new form that fits this content? So the beginning always feels for me like the first time, and it's hard, but it's also really exciting and sort of full of possibility.