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- [00:08]
A
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. This week feels like it went by in a blur, in part because it was a pledge drive week, which is always an extra busy time for us, and also because we had amazing guests on the show. Just think back to Monday. Steve Martin and Allison Brown were live in studio and they brought their banjos. We talked with Ethan Hawke about his role as Lorenz Hart in Blue moon. We had 10 student journalists on to talk about the issues facing their high schools and the podcasts they made about those issues. And we had the leads and directors from Ragtime in studio yesterday. If you missed any of those conversations, go back and listen to them. Wherever you get your podcasts, you can also find them on our show page@wnyc.org where we also have transcripts and thank you to everyone who donated during WNYC's Fall Pledge Drive. We appreciate each and every one of you. Now let's get this hour started with some Liberation. Liberation is coming to Broadway. Opening night is scheduled for Tuesday, October 28th. The play, which is by Bess Wall, takes us back to a 1970s Ohio gym where a women's consciousness raising meeting is nothing too formal. It was set up by Lizzie, who's looking for women who want to change the way things are. We get to know Lizzie quite well because she has a dual role in the play. We see her in the 70s trying to keep this group together, and we see her in the present breaking the fourth Wall talking to us, the audience. Lizzie has questions about her mom. She wants answers from the women who knew her mom in the 1970s when she attended these meetings. One woman, name Celeste, a black graduate student, has returned home to care for her sick mother. But she's also brought some secrets. Liberation is running at the James Earl Jones theater through Sunday, January 11th. So this is your chance to get tickets. In the spring. I spoke to playwright Bess Wall as well as Susanna Flood, who plays Lizzie, and Kristin Lloyd, who plays Celeste. It's when the show is off Broadway. I start by talking to Susanna about being the first actor we see on stage when the play begin casually and she speaks directly to the audience. I asked her how that entrance affects the way the audience settles into the show.
- [02:46]
B
Well, a lot of people don't know that the show is starting, and there have been people who've vocalized that confusion in different ways throughout. But it's the second time where I've been in a theatrical moment where the lights are up on the audience and they do and I do think that that causes them to feel a part of the moment, to braid the present, the actual present moment in which the audience is seeing the show into the context of the show. And I think that that gives them permission to relate to it, to internalize it from the go. Even yesterday, there was a woman. You know, I get to this part. It's just a little bit of exposition about being that we're in Ohio and there was a woman who. In the back. And at this point, the laser kind of changes. Just like, woo hoo. You know, she's like this. Whoever is this person is like in Ohio from ohi. And they're feeling some pride. So it does. It sets up a conversational mode. And I think that that survives. I mean, I'd be curious how you guys feel. But, like, I think that that means that when we get to the later revelation, revelations in the play, people feel that they can talk back to the play throughout. When we talk about McGovern, when we talk about Nixon, when we talk about even the no fault divorce law, people, especially people who live through that era, then feel that they can express even words, language out loud in the theater, which is a tradition that doesn't really belong to the theater, but could and should.
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A
Chris Lynn, do you and the other actors watch backstage to get a vibe on the audience?
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C
Absolutely.
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B
I didn't know that.
- [04:27]
C
Absolutely. We watch you on the monitor. We try to listen for what they're saying. Who might be the person who's taking this opportunity to talk to you about themselves?
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A
Yes.
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C
But it's always. It always really fun for you to start out. You do such a great job.
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A
Thank you.
- [04:44]
C
You're welcome.
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B
Well, Kristalyn's the first person who comes on when the women start coming on. Crystal's the first person who walks on. And I always feel like, phew.
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D
Yeah.
- [04:55]
A
Did you always start the play that way with Lizzie speaking?
- [05:00]
D
I did to a degree. I mean, I've written like 25 versions of this play, of drafts of this play with other titles and other approaches. But actually having the play start with Lizzie speaking was the thing that cracked it open for me. Having someone in come in and say, like, here I am with you, and we're gonna do this together and bringing the audience and in that way. And it sort of allows us also to look at the past in relation to the moment we're in now. You know, Lizzie is not me. She's not an autobiographical play by any means. But Lizzie does stand in for a person trying to make a play for the audience and with the audience and ask big questions together. I really. I wanted this to feel as much like a happening as like a play, sort of like a thing in real time that we're making and discovering with the audience.
- [05:47]
A
How does it feel to play the dual roles, Susanna?
- [05:51]
B
It's. I mean, I actually don't experience them as different, to tell you the truth. Like, I experience the questions of the play and the dilemma of Lizzie the mom and Lizzie the daughter as a comparable dilemma. And, in fact, there used to be this. There's a section at the end of Act 1 where the character Susan talks about the idea of artificial wombs. And we sort of get into a debate. And it used to be that all of that, that entire conversation belonged just between her and Lizzie the daughter, the narrator that you meet at the beginning of the play. And we, in rehearsal, we discovered it was better, actually, to keep the first half of that scene in the past so that all of the women, you know, could be talking about that together.
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D
And.
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B
And so, especially as we've gone on this debate about what does it mean to have a child and to be a woman in the world, and not just a woman in the world doing a job, but. And getting paid for it, but having a vocation, by which I mean something that you think you're put on the earth to do, that you love, that is a craft that you are going to practice over your whole life. You can probably relate to that. Allison. Like that. That.
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D
That.
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B
That is a tension inside of a person. And how do you balance those things? And I feel that debate starting for Lizzie the mom, and it just, over the course of the scene, just spills over into the present version of Liz, by which I just mean Susanna myself. This is the question that is on my mind all the time now. So I don't actually experience them as that. As that. It doesn't feel like a dual role. It feels like one continuous role.
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A
Celeste, you play.
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D
Excuse me.
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A
Kristin, you play Celeste. This Radcliffe grad comes into the gym, a boy's gym should mention. She's been. She's come to Ohio to care for her sick mother.
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C
Yes.
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A
Why do you think she shows up to this group?
- [07:54]
C
I think she's at her wit's end. She. She. She, you know, implies that she has five other people, four other people who could be taking care of her mother, but it has fallen on her, and I don't imagine at the top of the birthing order or at the bottom of the birthing order. So I think, you know, watching my Grandmother slowly go from Alzheimer's, and what a long journey that was, and having an aunt who was the caregiver and how grief can just. It sucks life out of you. So I think she's at a point where she's like, I need something to keep me going. I need some remnant of my New York life and myself, who I discovered in New York after leaving Ohio. I need that or she's gonna drown. You know, if someone had asked me to. My parents needed me to go back to Texas right now for a long period of time to take care of them. I. I can. I can understand why Celeste gets to the point where she's like, I don't care that they're all white women. I am going to this group. I need to find my people. And it may not be like skin folk. It might be, you know, on another level.
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A
So how does she feel that she's.
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D
In a group of white people?
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C
Oh, othered. I mean, from the beginning. And I think there, you know, you'll see throughout the show, there's another black character that shows up, and you get to see the tension between what Celeste is trying to hold onto, but what she's. The freedom that she's finding in this group and the strength and the confidence that she's finding with fighting these things. And, you know, a lot of people after the civil rights movement, it got so quiet. Everyone was so tired. Everyone was burnt out. Our leaders had been assassinated. So around the 70s, you notice, like, the Black Panther Party starts doing more stuff involving, like, community, because the fight had just drained everything out of them. So I think there is a rejuvenation with being in this group for her, while also a conflict of race and conversation in that social aspect.
- [09:56]
A
But she said this is an autobiographical play, but there are some. Some tokens to your past. Your mom worked for Ms. Magazine. What specifics did you pull from your mom or the women she grew up with that you used in the play?
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D
Yeah, when I was a child, my mom worked at ms, so I sort of looked up to all of her friends and to her. I really idolized them. And I saw them as these sort of incredible, larger than life women who were engaged in this really important fight. And I think that kind of sense of possibility and of activism that I learned from them was something I really wanted to represent in the play. I think, thankfully, my mother is still with us, unlike the mother character in this play, which I'm so grateful for. And there's a conversation in the play that the narrator of the play Never got to have with her mother that she has toward the end of the play. And that was a conversation that I actually was able to call up my mother and have with her. Oh my gosh. And then I put that conversation into the play. So it was just incredibly meaningful for me through the act of writing this play, to have the conversations I wanted to have with my mother and to sort of ask the question of like, can we see our mothers as people beyond the function they have in their. In our lives? You know, can we see our mothers as full human beings? That's a conversation that the play is really in dialogue with and that forms the heart of this piece for me and is a very personal conversation between me and my mother.
- [11:30]
A
Are there any women in your life that remind you of the women that you're playing in the 70s?
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B
Oh, you know, I had a. Well, I keep on my dressing room table a picture of this woman who was like a grandmother to me. She was actually my. This is weird, but this is gonna. In the words of the play, this is a little bit weird. I've never said this to anyone, but it's true. This is true. My mom's first mother in law was like a grandmother to me growing up. And she, and she and my grandmother are both captured in this photo. And neither of them are here anymore, but they both sort of like lived through this era and had very different responses to it. My actual biological grandma was living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and didn't. Didn't. The movement didn't touch her up there. And my surrogate grandmother did sort of like exit her. She reformed her life after her children, you know, were teenagers. And they both are responsible in different ways for me feeling like I could be an actor. So I guess, like, I feel I sort of dedicate it to them though, and I hold them in my mind. And to this question about conversations never had, I do wish that I could. You know, I remember like, my mom's siblings are spread out over kind of a wide range. And the eldest, who was really close to my grandma, once told me this story that was told to her by one of my grandmother's friends who said that I think if Lillian had had been able to choose her life, basically, she would have done something more like what Susanna was doing, which, you know, my grandma, she never got to see me. We lived in different places, you know, and so I guess, like, I. I find their. The fact of their historical presence to be an organizing principle.
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A
How about for you, Kristalyn? Is there someone in Your life?
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D
Yes.
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C
I mean, there are two people that I constantly conjure when I'm in the show. They're both alive, which is beautiful. One of them is my dad's mother, who raised her five kids on her own because my grandfather died when I think my dad was seven. And so, you know, she never remarried after that. And she's 95 now and her mind is still there, you know, but the movement never touched her. When I talked to my mother about the movement, it never touched Beaumont, Texas. It never touched Freeport, Texas. So my grandmother, we have very different political and religious beliefs. She's very Christian and I am not. And so a lot of her views aren't feminist. But watching her spend her, from what I know, her entire existence to me without a husband was pivotal. I did not have a lot of role models growing up in Texas of women who didn't get married and didn't have kids before the age of 25. Like, I was in 13 weddings by the time I was 27.
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D
Oh my gosh.
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A
13.
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C
Yes. And the youngest was an 18 year old friend of mine who got married right out of high school. So I didn't have a lot of examples except for my grandmother, who didn't have a husband and my theater teacher in high school. Her name is Allison Frost, and she was probably one of the first feminists I ever encountered. And I remember one of the biggest things that stuck out to me when I first met her was when I asked her about doing Grease at the school and she like cussed Grease out up and down. I was like, I am never doing that effing play. She was like, has nothing good to help women out. And I was like, what?
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D
Oh.
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C
Oh my gosh.
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B
Wait, what?
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C
And it really clicked this thing in me. And she cast me as Hamlet my senior year, which was another big thing to do. You know, it was a very feminist move of hers totally. And she inspired me to continue acting on a much more specific and intentional level. So everything that I try to do after, you know, once I got to New York, I do very specific plays. I choose. I choose my projects. And I, you know, this one was, was perfect, perfect timing. And I think that those two women have. It's. It's the reason I'm still going. My grandmother has never seen anything I've done on stage. She saw me in a soap opera. Cause I was on one for three years and for her that was like, she made it. My granddaughter has made it. I was literally on my way to rehearsal for 1776 a Broadway show I was leading, and she's on the phone with me, and she's like, so when are you gonna choose your second career? I said, what?
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B
She said, you know, something that you.
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C
I said, well, what do you think I should do? You seem to know me so well. She said, well, what about a teacher or a secretary? And I was like, girl, woo, we gotta get you up to New York. We gotta. Just so you can see that there is a career to be had for a black woman who has no kids and no husband. It scares my grandmother to death.
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B
So when you play Hamlet, right? She's coming.
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C
She's coming.
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B
Yeah.
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A
A soap opera. Come on now.
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C
Bold and the Beautiful, baby.
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A
See, that's for Grandma.
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C
Bold and the Beautiful did it for you, girl.
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B
All right.
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A
These women are all coming to this meeting. Bess, why do you think they keep coming back to this meeting?
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D
It's a great question. I think it's really the friendships. You know, I didn't realize I was writing about this when I started, but we really discovered in rehearsal how much this play is about friendship between women, which is something that I know I personally crave so much and hold so dearly. And I think they start to become the only people they can tell certain things to, you know, And I think there's a sort of loneliness that's being soothed by the group and a feeling of solidarity that's being created by the group that keeps them coming back. And then I think the play also delves into, like, the complications between women and their friendships. Like, what are they not telling each other, Each other? What things can they not get beyond, no matter how hard they try? But ultimately, like, to me, this story is so much about the sort of sacred nature of female friendship.
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A
So where does Celeste fall on the feminism range? Is she a radical, or does she believe in slow doing it slow motion? What does she think?
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C
I think she believes in putting in the work and taking the risk. And, you know, the sacrifice is necessary, which is where her and Lizzie kind of differ. Like, I think, because black women know that the sacrifice is necessary, it's not as scary. And we. I think, because of the way privilege is set up and race, that we just are, like, we have less to lose. Like, you know, and I think she struggles with it when it comes to her sexuality, which I can completely understand as someone who came out when she was, like, 36 as bisexual. Holding on to that is such an identity. So I think that's the one place where she hadn't examined and hadn't really gone into depth with herself. And we see the, you know, results of that in the show.
- [19:02]
A
I know you've had after show meetups with the audience for audience questions. Bess, what kind of questions do people have? What are they interested in knowing about the play?
- [19:12]
D
Oh, people always surprise me with their questions, as much as I think I know. I mean, people. A lot of people wanna know about the process of making it because the work that's happening on stage with this cast is so brave. And so it just. They're really like ripping their hearts out for you every night. And how we could have gotten to that point with the trust with each other and in the work, I would say, is the thing that people often wanna know about. Like, what process did you go through to create an. Where people felt safe having these conversations and going to these incredibly raw emotional places? And it's really a credit to our director, Whitney White, who is just extraordinary. She's a son.
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A
She's good.
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D
She's a good one. She really is just like, you know, absolutely a visionary. And she created this environment of safety and trust in the room. And then to our amazing company of actors who also trusted each other to go to these places that frankly, I haven't seen on very many stages. It's really, to me, that's part of what's radical and revolutionary about this play.
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A
Part of it is that for at least one part of the play, the cast is nude. Was that always part of your script?
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D
It was, it was. I knew that I had to go there in the play in part because when I researched real consciousness raising groups and, you know, they called them rap groups in the 70s, it was one of the things they did. And it was something that a lot of women from that era who I spoke with were really, really proud of and really, really an important part of their process. And in a play that's so much about intimacy and about trust, it felt like a very natural expression of that trust. And we worked with an incredible intimacy coordinator named Kelsey Rainwater, who was like, very careful about making sure that everyone's boundaries were respected. But it was a sort of important and very brave part of the process for everybody. And I feel like in some ways it's the heart of the play.
- [21:14]
A
Was this your first time being nude, either of you?
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B
No, unfortunately. But it's definitely the best time. Yeah, my parents were acting teachers. They always said that. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Family, Family guild. But. But they. My dad always said that acting is controlled humiliation, which gave me a. Yeah, I think, but. But Honestly, it's not. I don't feel that this part of the play, Kristalin, you jump in here, is actually the scariest part of the play.
- [21:50]
C
No, the scariest part is different for everyone. Yeah, that's not my scariest part. This isn't my first time being nude. I did it for a Dominique Morisseau play called Confederates at the Signature a couple years ago. I showed my breasts, and it was a very political form. And when I saw this in this script, I was like, like, okay, baby, let's do it. Let's do it. My parents are not actors. They are electrical engineer and a math teacher. So, yeah.
- [22:22]
A
Kristin, what do you hope people, after they see the play, go have coffee, go have a drink? What do you hope they have conversations.
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C
About who they are? I hope they're having conversations about who they are. I hope they're having conversations about what they believe and how they want to carry that into their everyday life. You know, I've invited my mother and her sisters and all of my female cousins because I'm like, we need to have more conversations about this as women. My. My female cousins are also a lot more liberal than the moms we grew up with. So I'm hoping that that is what it inspires. And men and women.
- [23:02]
A
How about for you, Bess?
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D
I agree with Kristalyn. I mean, I hope that people sort.
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A
Of.
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D
Find the courage to have a deeper level of intimacy in the conversations that they do have as well. You know, so much of this play is about, like, how true can you be to yourself and how truthful can you be in your relationships and can you have the conversations that matter before it's too late? Before it's too late on a personal level with the people you love and before it's too late for us as a society, you know, the time is now for us to be talking about these things, and you can't wait. So I hope that it lights a fire under people to do that kind of deep work.
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A
Any thoughts?
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D
Susanna, your last?
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B
Well, I guess the thing for me is about the heroism of my journey through the play has a lot to do with children and mothers. And I guess when I became a mom, I was astounded by what I had taken for granted in my friends who had been mothers. You know, I had taken about what they were accomplishing just on a daily level, getting through the world. And I think that there is a level of heroism in that. I'm not talking about a sentimental version of that word. I'm talking about an actual chivalric going out into the world and doing something concrete. I think that that is is underestimated as an action and I want more claiming of the power of that in our political leaders. I want nobody to feel emasculated by owning that. I want that to be claimed as a real positive, forward footed value. So that's what, that's what I not to think of motherhood as a kind of passive inside the home thing, but that the actual heroism of it, because I think that that is a paradigm shift that would lead to a lot in the world.
- [25:10]
A
That was my conversation with playwright Bess Wall and actors Susanna Flood and Kristalln Lloyd, who star in the Broadway show Liberation. It opens next week.
- [25:22]
C
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B
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