The Feminist Icons Who Inspired The Minds Behind Liberation

Bess Wohl didn’t intend for Liberation to be about quite so many things — it just happened to turn out that way. “It’s actually a big play,” she says of her show, which began performances Oct. 8 at Broadway’s James Earl Jones Theatre. “It tells the story of a daughter trying to find answers about her mother’s life as a way of trying to understand her own life,” she adds. “It’s funny. It’s about female friendship and laughter and pain. It’s also political and responds in a lot of ways to the moment we live in today by looking at the past.”

The show, which mostly takes place in 1970s Ohio, begins in the present day, with the narrator (Susannah Flood) attempting to recreate a past she never knew — a time when her mother lived as a radical before transitioning into a costume-sewing homemaker. She achieves this both by interviewing people her mom met in a consciousness-raising group and by embodying her within that group. The women (portrayed by Betsy Aidem, Audrey Corsa, Kayla Davion, Kristolyn Lloyd, Irene Sofia Lucio, and Adina Verson) are multi-generational and multi-ethnic, with each one there for her own reasons, one accidentally even. They listen to and laugh with each other, grow together, and try to enact change. Then a man (Charlie Thurston) threatens their unity.

The show felt particularly of the moment when it premiered off-Broadway last winter, a time when women’s rights were being taken away and “trad wife” content was ricocheting around social media. There were tears in the audience, but also a sense of hope: a feeling that women uniting could have a transformative impact, both on small and large scales.

“I want the next generation of women to see this play and say ‘Yes, if we come together, we can change the world,’” Aidem says. “I think women have always been the strongest source of social change.”

With that collaborative spirit in mind, Aidem and the cast, along with Wohl and director Whitney White, share their girl-power syllabus of the pop culture that shaped them — and what they’d pass along to others.

Rebels With A Cause

Flood: When I was little, I was obsessed with Princess Leia because she carried a blaster, led an army, and was fighting for liberty.

Wohl: Barbie was a big deal for me. I went through a rebellious phase where I gave all my Barbies crew cuts, and they were always naked. The rebelliousness of Miss Piggy was really interesting to me. I was also really influenced by Wonder Woman and Annie Oakley.

White: My mother bought me a boombox and a series of Zora Neale Hurston tapes. Zora Neale Hurston has deeply shaped my idea of feminism and Black female power and the power of a female artist.

Verson: I have a 5-year-old daughter. We watched KPop Demon Hunters, which is a feminist movie about these three awesome women. I was thrilled that it centers bad*ss women.

Fully Empowered Divas

Corsa: Playing Guitar Hero, I played “Barracuda” and my mom told me all about Heart. It was so powerful to see women rocking hard, taking up space, and being extremely talented.

Thurston: Seeing how women like the Spice Girls can be loud and proud and be whatever they wanted to be was informative to me as a young guy.

Lucio: I grew up in Puerto Rico, and our children’s entertainer was Xuxa — she was the children’s entertainer for a lot of Latin America, and a model who used to date Pelé, the soccer star. She was gorgeous and this force. We would all sing like her and want to be like her.

Wohl: I have three daughters, and they’re massive Taylor Swift fans. They’re also into Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Gracie Abrams. Music plays a big part in their lives in terms of where they find inspiration of what they could be. Taylor Swift has offered them a vision of a young woman as a businessperson as well.

Aidem: Miley Cyrus got all that sh*t about twerking, and then “Flowers” became a huge hit, which is like, “I’m better off without you; I can buy myself flowers.” That’s empowering.

Fearlessly Funny Girls

Davion: From The Cosby Show up until That’s So Raven, I watched Raven-Symoné. She did a lot with physical language and created motifs for Black women to jump into. It was truly the first time I really saw a Black girl starring in her own show where she could fully be comedic.

Lloyd: I have a little girl who I started nannying a year ago, and I started putting on female-led musicals for her. Hairspray was the perfect opportunity for me to get to talk about body positivity and female friendships. Legally Blonde was amazing — we talked about why people wouldn’t take Elle Woods seriously.

Davion: The beauty about [The Cosby Show spinoff] A Different World was there were so many Black women getting an education, standing up for things they believed in. You learned about sororities that way, they talked about deep topics like sexual abuse and harassment, and the theme song really slapped.

Lucio: There was a little girl on American television, Punky Brewster, and we all bought her sneakers. I was scrappy, and the scrappy characters — girls who were tomboys at the time but think they could just do what boys did — appealed to me. I thought I was Punky Brewster.

Women Who Ran The Show

Lloyd: Shows like Mama’s Family, The Golden Girls, Everybody Loves Raymond [influenced me]. I grew up in a predominantly white, conservative Christian society where you’re groomed to be a wife and a mother. Watching women who were funny and had careers and were subverting the idea of the housewife was very impactful.

Aidem: That Girl with Marlo Thomas, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I Love Lucy. There were women that seemed really dominant. I remember thinking, “Mary Tyler Moore has a job.” I was raised to grow up and have a job, not to be a housewife. That was even though my mother was a housewife. She could have had a job, she was really brilliant, but she didn’t. For me, it was always make your own way.

Verson: Mrs. Huxtable [from The Cosby Show] comes to mind. She’s so confident and calm in a way that I did not experience in my daily life. That calm power over such a crazy, loud family was really badass to me.

Corsa: The Golden Girls. It’s fun to get to see women who are older and still valuable and still having their lives.