Bess Wohl’s Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning play, Liberation, comes Oct. 23 to Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theatre. Directed by Whitney White, the production locks up audience phones, freeing the audience to find unlimited power and hope in a story based on everyday champions of the 1970s feminist revolution.
Liberation has a group of women meeting in a rec center basement to ask sticky questions of themselves and each other. What identity do I claim as a woman? What does it mean to be liberated? Where and when am I safe?
The play time travels, jumping decades forward as the daughter of Lizzie, the group’s ad-hoc leader, explores her mother’s history. Telling the story are other women in the collective: Margie, a housewife consumed with sadness and resentment; Celeste, a radical Black lesbian who cares for her elderly mother. There is also Susan, who lives out of her car; Isidora, a working-class Italian immigrant trapped in a green-card marriage; and Dora, who has encountered sexism in the workplace.
Included in the scenes of the women’s meetings is one in which the women are unclothed. To protect the rights of the performers, Berkeley Rep has partnered with Yondr to make sure all phones are powered off and locked in Yondr pouches during the show. Audience members maintain possession of their phones and are able to unlock the pouches at intermission and after the play.
Two-time Tony Award-nominated director Whitney White returns to Berkeley after having directed Jaja’s African Hair Braiding in 2024. In a phone interview from her home base in Brooklyn, New York, White offered her definition of liberation.
“Liberation means you’re able to explore your political, intellectual, scholarly, motherly or sexual self in a free way,” White said. “You’re not at risk of bodily harm, political oppression or coercion, bullying or abuse if you decide to step up and say, ‘I am here.’ Do you feel safe in your home, job, body? We should all be able to say ‘yes’ to those things.”
White herself has gravitated to feminist figureheads—including Angela Davis and Maya Angelou—since childhood.
“In middle school, one of the first poems I ever performed was ‘Why the Caged Bird Sings,’” White said. “Also, there were Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Felicia LaCour. These women shaped me. Reading about women who used their voices made me want to use mine.”
Developing how to use one’s voice means not just dissenting, but contributing to conversations about gender, racial and social equity, White asserts. Achieving that goal requires her supportive community, which includes members of the creative team for Liberation. Discussions with intimacy consultant Kelsey Rainwater were rich and explorative, according to White. Similarly, working with David Zinn (scenic design), Qween Jean (costume design), Cha See (lighting design) and Palmer Hefferan (sound design) solidified her belief that “my ideas were possible and weren’t crazy.”
Asked to identify a few young role models she admires in the feminist movement, White said: “It’s hard to find inspiring role models now. It’s so much easier to be negative today. Who is going to be our new Angela Davis? Who is willing to stand up? That’s a big question I’m still asking.”
Wohl’s script frames those questions and others in scenes that transition between Lizzie’s fourth-wall-breaking talk to the audience and jumping back into a meta-theatric scene. Pacing is essential.
“I try to smooth out their ride and trust the language,” White said. “Trust that the audience is excited. Think of Shakespeare narrators. When those actors talk to the audience and scream and force it, you don’t want to listen. When they just breathe and connect, it happens.”
Audience response to the play varies, but the overall reaction demonstrates women connect to the primary themes—regardless of generation. Some women have read and know 1970s feminists’ writing and political teachings from years of study, while others only have heard about them or seen them portrayed in a film.
“The reality is, sadly, all audiences connect,” White said. “My mother and I both connect because we’re trying to understand why a woman can’t have a child and a job and love and stability and be successful in all those areas.”
White values talking to women who lived in the ’70s when they were denied the right to open bank accounts and access contraception. In a country that in 2026 has put a woman’s reproductive rights in jeopardy or out of reach, she believes live theater holds power. She hopes Liberation causes people to remember the risks taken by previous generations and to consider their own actions of bravery. Freedom, she insists, is deserved by all.
‘Liberation,’ Oct. 23-Nov. 29 at Berkeley Rep, Roda Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. 510.647.2949. berkeleyrep.org
