--- title: Liberation Won the 2026 Pulitzer for Drama by Taking You Inside a 1970s Women's Group description: "Bess Wohl's Liberation won the 2026 Pulitzer for Drama and the Tony for Best Play: a 1970s women's group, a mother and a daughter's search." author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-11-06T10:00:55.581Z updated: 2026-11-06T10:00:55.597Z canonical: https://richwoman.co/article/liberation-pulitzer-2026 image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-35204016.webp categories: Culture & Society content_type: Feature region: Americas publication: Rich Woman Magazine schema_type: Article about: - type: Person name: Bess Wohl description: American playwright whose play Liberation won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2026 Tony Award for Best Play. Her earlier plays include Grand Horizons and Small Mouth Sounds. jobTitle: Playwright sameAs: - https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/bess-wohl --- You probably picture 1970s feminism as marches, placards and headlines. Bess Wohl's *Liberation* takes you somewhere smaller and more personal: a basement gymnasium in Ohio, where six women sit in a circle and start to talk. What begins as a conversation turns into an attempt to change their own lives and the world. The play won the [2026 Pulitzer Prize for Drama](https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/bess-wohl), the prize for a distinguished play by an American author dealing with American life. A month later it won the Tony Award for Best Play, and Wohl became only the fourth woman to take that award. ## Six women in a basement gymnasium The play opens in 1970. Lizzie gathers a small group of women for a consciousness-raising group, the kind of meeting where women shared their private lives and discovered how much they had in common. Fifty years later, Lizzie's daughter finds herself asking the same questions her mother asked, and she goes back into the past to look for answers. The play moves between the two eras, so you watch the women of 1970 talk their way towards change while a daughter of the next generation looks back and measures what they won. ## A play drawn from the playwright's mother *Liberation* comes from Wohl's own family. Her mother, Lisa Cronin Wohl, wrote for Ms. magazine in the 1970s, and the play draws on her story. Wohl has said she wanted to answer a gap she kept noticing in the culture. 'We are tired of the lack of curiosity about women's experience,' she said. The Pulitzer board praised the play's blend of comedy and sincerity, and that balance is the source of its pleasure. The women are funny, sharp and contradictory, and the play lets you laugh with them one moment and feel the weight of their choices the next. ## From an off-Broadway hit to a Broadway prizewinner Roundabout Theatre Company first staged the play off-Broadway at the Laura Pels Theatre in early 2025, directed by Whitney White. It then moved to Broadway at the James Earl Jones Theatre, where it ran from October 2025 to February 2026 with a cast that included Susannah Flood and Betsy Aidem. At the Tony Awards, Wohl used her speech to look forward. 'I want to honor women everywhere who have the courage to use their voice,' she said. 'And to all the girls out there, may you speak your truth, and may the world be wise enough to listen.' Wohl's earlier work includes *Grand Horizons*, nominated for the Tony for Best Play, and *Small Mouth Sounds*. ![The gold Pulitzer Prize medal, showing Benjamin Franklin in profile with the words Honoris Causa.](https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pulitzer-medal-obverse-svg.webp) *The Pulitzer Prize medal, designed by Daniel Chester French — Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC0 public domain* ## Women have written seven of the last ten drama winners The first Pulitzer for Drama, in 1918, went to a man, and women have written or co-written 22 of the 95 winning plays since. Zona Gale became the first woman to win, in 1921, for *Miss Lulu Bett*. The longest drought followed Ketti Frings in 1958: no woman won again until Beth Henley in 1981, for *Crimes of the Heart*. The last decade has turned that record around. Women have written seven of the last ten winning plays, from Lynn Nottage's *Sweat* in 2017 to Eboni Booth's *Primary Trust* in 2024 and now *Liberation*. This year's jury was chaired by the theatre critic Helen Shaw and included two past winners, Quiara Alegría Hudes and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. The other finalists were Nazareth Hassan's *Bowl EP*, about two skateboarders making a hip-hop album, and Talene Monahon's *Meet the Cartozians*, which uses the Armenian American experience to examine American immigration. ## Last year's winner was also a family drama with history at its heart The 2025 prize went to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins for *Purpose*, a comedy-drama about a prosperous African American family whose patriarch was a civil rights figure. Watch the two winners side by side and you see the same instinct at work. Both plays bring a family together in a room, let the past press in on the present and ask what one generation owes the next. ## What stays with you after the curtain You leave *Liberation* thinking about the women in your own family, and the conversations you have had, or never had, with your mother. The play makes no claim that the women of 1970 finished the job. It shows you how much changed when ordinary women started to talk, and how much is still left for their daughters to say. **See it if** you love theatre that makes you laugh and think in the same breath, you grew up hearing stories of the 1970s, or you want to share an evening of theatre with your mother or daughter. **Where to see it** - [Liberation at the Geffen Playhouse, Los Angeles, 27th January to 28th February 2027](https://www.geffenplayhouse.org/blog/liberation-wins-pulitzer-prize-5-tony-award-nominations/) **About Bess Wohl** Playwright American playwright whose play Liberation won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2026 Tony Award for Best Play. Her earlier plays include Grand Horizons and Small Mouth Sounds. *Next in the series: Picaflor: A Future Myth by Gabriela Lena Frank, winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Music.*