NEW YORK (AP) — On any given evening as the lights come up on Act 2 of “Liberation,” Bess Wohl’s intergenerational Broadway play about a women’s consciousness-raising group, you can hear supportive cheers of “Whoo!” and “Yeah!” — and sometimes, a round of applause. All before a single word has been uttered. There’s a reason for the burst of appreciation — or solidarity? — from the crowd. Onstage, six characters are launching one of the bolder scenes on Broadway in this, and perhaps many a season. Each one — members of a makeshift group sometime in the ‘70s — strips naked, for some 15 minutes of dialogue.Wohl says she wondered, back when she was writing, whether “Liberation” might become known as “that play with the naked scene” — with the rest collapsing around it. Thankfully, the playwright says, the conversation has been much larger.
“I’ve been very gratified,” she says of the reaction. “It doesn’t feel titillating or gratuitous or gimmicky. It feels like a really important piece of the work that the women in the consciousness-raising group are doing.”The idea came to Wohl as she was researching what such groups — women of different ages, races and economic backgrounds — actually did. She learned that exploring their bodies was a major need.
