It’s not unique to the theater—it happens with films, novels, television shows, even music—but it often seems more common in plays that their writers feel the need to earn our attention, or perhaps justify theater’s frequently high ticket prices, by making sure we know that their work is about something, and about something serious and worthy. This tendency—let’s call it “about-ism”—can be the death of drama, let alone of entertainment value.

That’s why, when a play of real intellectual heft comes along that also happens to be fizzy, funny, moving and smart, it’s a cause for wonder and celebration. Such is the case with Bess Wohl’s “Liberation,” now on Broadway after a successful Off-Broadway run earlier this year. Subtitled “a memory play about things I don’t remember,” it follows Lizzie (Susannah Flood), a clear stand-in for the playwright, as she attempts to reconstruct her late mother’s feminist consciousness-raising group from the early 1970s, and in the process to figure out what’s gone wrong since then. Why do women, despite the inarguable progress they have made since the bad old days when they couldn’t even open bank accounts in their own names and marital rape was legal, still get paid less and assaulted more than men? Did second-wave feminists like Lizzie’s mom somehow compromise the movement by marrying and raising families? And where does all that leave Lizzie, and women, in 2025?

Wohl’s play begins disarmingly, with Lizzie addressing the audience directly on the subject they most want to know up front: not what the play’s about but its running time.

Honestly, it’s not even your fault, it’s like, this is the modern condition—not to sound grandiose, “this is the modern condition,” but honestly—it’s like, you decide to come, you get dressed up—well, all right, you didn’t get dressed up—but you put on clothes, thank you for that. You put on clothes. You make your way through the subway, the traffic, the hellscape that is Times Square, you go down like six escalators into the bowels of the earth, you finally get here, and then you hope that the entire experience will be as short as humanly possible. No, I get it, I have kids too. I spend my life trying to get away from them and then trying to get back to them so…

That gives some idea of how “Liberation” works—how it jokes its way toward home truths. While we become intimately engaged with the six women who meet over a period of years in a fluorescent-lit high school gym in Ohio, the narrator Lizzie never quite lets us lose sight of the play’s retrospective frame. Under the expert direction of Whitney White, the play has a vibrant theatricality that almost bursts the bonds of the stage. A long, nonsexual nude scene in the second act, in which the women do a sort of show-and-tell about their bodies, is just one of the many tricks Wohl has up her sleeve.

Both the humor and the transparent theatricality are enjoyable in themselves; they are also expert feints. For what “Liberation” is, really, is a play of ideas and argument, in the tradition of George Bernard Shaw or Tony Kushner. It presents a spectrum of views, from the radical feminism of Susan (Adina Verson), who lives in her car and whose first speech is about how she’s already “burnt out on women’s liberation,” to the bitter resignation of housewife Margie (Betsy Aidem), who delivers a dizzying litany of household chores that her retiree husband simply expects her to do. A wary Black academic named Celeste (Kristolyn Lloyd), in town to care for her ailing mother, addresses what we would now call intersectional oppression, while a chatty Italian immigrant, Isidora (Irene Sofia Lucio), is impatient with airy theoretical talk and craves action.

Rounding out the cast is Dora (Audrey Corsa), a young woman who initially mistook the gathering for a knitting circle but who ends up transformed by it, and Joanne (Kayla Davion), a Black woman who enters the gym as a harried mom looking for her son’s backpack and ends up not joining the group but challenging its blind spots—and, in a bold, meta-theatrical gambit, the play’s.

Lizzie’s mom, as also played by Flood, is the final puzzle piece in the picture. She often ends up stuck in the middle of the group’s debates: A beginning journalist, relegated at the local paper to writing up obituaries and weddings (“in a way the same thing,” she quips), she doesn’t feel she can join marches and strikes, and often speaks up for nuance, against the grain of the group’s more activist members. Or is her real dilemma that she just wants to settle down with handsome Bill (Charlie Thurston), and that for all their idealism about forging an “equal marriage,” this will become the signal betrayal of second-wave feminism?

This question drives the play forward to a bracing, equivocal conclusion, in which Aidem takes over the role of Lizzie’s mom and subtly, sympathetically turns the play upside down. To Lizzie’s question, “What went wrong?,” her mother answers: “I think it’s so interesting that you’re asking what we did wrong, instead of asking what’s wrong with the world.” And to the question of whether raising a family diverted her, and her generation, from the path of liberation, her mother replies:

It was a huge problem for us, the having you, the raising you, and the way you took so much for granted and let so much slide—not just the political progress but the community—the solidarity—I don’t know where that is now, maybe it’s there. Maybe it’s here. I really don’t know.

That’s a plaint that hits hard now, in our atomized, polarized and often politically paralyzed world. It wouldn’t hit at all, though, if “Liberation” were not such a rich and expertly crafted piece of theater—the kind of play that is, yes, definitely about something, but which, like all the best theater, is really about human beings, both onstage and in the audience. In that sense, it’s one place we can still find community.

Rob Weinert-Kendt, an arts journalist and editor of American Theatre magazine, has written for The New York Times and Time Out New York.