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    Review: In ‘Liberation,’ the Feminist Revolution Will Be Dramatized

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    Bess Wohl’s moving new play, about a group of women in 1970s Ohio, explores the power of sisterhood and the limits of motherhood.How much would you give to see your mother again as she was in her prime — which is to say, before she had you?That’s one of the be-careful-what-you-wish-for scenarios that Bess Wohl dramatizes in “Liberation,” her gutting new play about the promise and unfinished business of feminism. All the clenched fists and manifestoes in the world cannot point its second-wave characters, or even their nth-wave daughters, to the sweet spot between love and freedom. Indeed, the play’s warning, if not quite its watch cry, is: “It’s almost impossible to have both.”At any rate, it hasn’t been working for the six women who meet on Thursdays at 6 p.m. on the basketball court of a local rec center in a backwater Ohio town in 1970. There, amid banners celebrating local team championships — boys’ teams only, of course — they try to make of their random sisterhood a lifeboat to survive the revolution they seek. On the agenda: consciousness raising, problem sharing, political action and self-love prompts. Yes, at one session they all get nervously naked.But “Liberation,” which opened on Thursday at the Laura Pels Theater, is neither satire nor agitprop. As directed with cool patience by Whitney White, the better to let its climax sear, and with a cast led by Susannah Flood and Betsy Aidem each at the top of her form, it is gripping and funny and formally daring. In a trick worthy of Escher, and befitting the complexity of the material, it nearly eats the box of its own containment, just as its characters, lacking other emotional sustenance, eat at theirs.The burden of the trick falls mostly on Flood, whose role is a superimposed, asynchronous portrait of at least two women. The main one is Lizzie, a young journalist stuck on the wedding beat at the local paper, with obits thrown in as a sop to her demand for equality. (In a way, the two beats “are the same thing,” she says.) Denying that she is the group’s leader, though she made the fliers and booked the room, she wants a revolution without having to give up anything to get it and while honoring everyone’s contrasting ideologies. History tells us where that approach typically leaves the left.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Walden’ Review: My Sister! My Twin! My Astronaut!

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      Emmy Rossum and Zoë Winters star in a new Off Broadway play that’s a climate disaster drama cohabiting with a domestic soap opera.Despite its name and original mission, Second Stage Theater, founded in 1979, has in recent years expanded its reach to include many new works by early-career playwrights.The latest beneficiary of that expansion is Amy Berryman, who makes her professional New York debut with “Walden,” the promising but unconvincing story of twin astronaut sisters on opposite sides of a philosophical divide in a devastating climate dystopia. It opened Thursday at Second Stage’s Off Broadway space, the Tony Kiser Theater in Midtown Manhattan.The promising part of the play is the new angle it offers on an old sci-fi setup. In Berryman’s vision of the near future, Earth has reached what the sisters call P.O.N.R., for “point of no return.” NASA, having (like Second Stage) expanded its original mission, decides to accelerate plans to build habitations on Mars. But unlike movies with a similar premise, the prime movers here are women.That makes for fresh takes on the usual questions of home and hearth and the fate of humanity. It’s nice to see that, at least at first, Cassie (Zoë Winters) is a gung-ho adventurer. Having just returned from a year on the moon, where she became the first person to “grow something from nothing” on its inhospitable surface, she has now been asked to lead an epochal mission to Mars.Not that Earth’s surface is much more hospitable, with violent weather and rising tides killing millions and causing wars. In response, Cassie’s skittish sister, Stella, has retreated to the American interior to nest in a corrugated but strangely chic wilderness cabin. Stella (Emmy Rossum) is also an astronaut — or was. Though she left NASA under mysterious circumstances, her design for a new habitation called Walden will be the one used on Mars. Cassie will likely live there for the rest of her life.On the weekend before she begins training for that future, Cassie visits Stella after a long estrangement. Inevitably, a debate breaks out between them about whether to prioritize saving the planet (as Stella favors) or preparing an escape route (as Cassie does). Encouraging Stella’s view is her boyfriend, Bryan (Motell Foster), a so-called Earth Advocate for whom expanding the reach of human depravity to virgin new worlds is a poor excuse for not cleaning up the old one.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren to Star in ‘Last Five Years’ on Broadway

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      Whitney White will direct the first Broadway production of Jason Robert Brown’s popular musical, which plans to open next spring.Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren are planning to star in a production of “The Last Five Years” on Broadway next spring.Jonas appeared in several Broadway shows as a child; his one starring role was in 2012, when he stepped into a production of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” and his most recent appearance on Broadway was for a Jonas Brothers concert stand last year.Warren is a Tony Award winner for playing the title role in “Tina.” She also had roles in Broadway productions of “Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed” and “Bring It On.”“The Last Five Years,” by Jason Robert Brown, is about the breakup of a marriage. Critics have rarely warmed to it, but it has a huge fan base, and is widely staged. It has never been on Broadway, in part because it is so small — just two characters and one act. The show also has an unusual structure: the male protagonist, a novelist named Jamie, tells the story from beginning to end, while the female protagonist, an actress named Cathy, tells it in reverse chronological order.It was first staged in Illinois, at Northlight Theater, in 2001, with Norbert Leo Butz and Lauren Kennedy, and then had an Off Broadway run at the Minetta Lane Theater in 2002, with Butz and Sherie Rene Scott. In the decades since, there have been numerous national and international productions and adaptations. There was a film adaptation, starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan, in 2015. More recently, Cynthia Erivo and Joshua Henry starred in a concert version in 2016, and at the height of the pandemic Out of the Box Theatrics and Holmdel Theater Company staged a memorable streaming production filmed inside an apartment with Nicholas Edwards and Nasia Thomas. (The number of licensed productions of the show doubled during the pandemic because the small cast and idiosyncratic narrative structure made it conducive to social distancing.)The Broadway production, directed by Whitney White (a Tony nominee for “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”), will be produced by Seaview, an increasingly prolific producing entity run by Greg Nobile; ATG Productions, a subsidiary of British theater owner ATG Entertainment; and the Season, which is the new producing entity of theater marketers Mike Karns and Steven Tartick. More