NYC EOY 2025 (part three)

Audrey Corsa, Irene Sofia Lucio,
Adina Verson, Kristolyn Lloyd
"Liberation" by Bess Wohl
James Earl Jones Theatre, 2025

Randy Settenbrino, owner of the Blue Moon Hotel, provided a verbal tour of the building, its history, his history. It’s a recent renovation, including three stories that he had added. Based on our experiences in the rooms across the street, he must have reconfigured every room on each floor, ours was quite spacious for NYC, very much so for the LES.

The main floor has a cafe and a dining area, the walls decorated with collages of neighborhood history and the landlord’s paintings, of his family, of Frida Kahlo, a series on the Fall of Man.

We returned to the Tenement Museum for the 100 Years Apart tour, detailing the Wong family (1970s) and the Gumpertz family (1870s) connected by their immigrant status and their successes in the garment industry.

Randy Settenbrino

It was also a big book store day, to Sweet Pickle Books, and also the Book Club Bar for Old Overholt Manhattans and reading. We both made an effort to get at least one book from each place we visited, or only one. For lunch we returned to Felix Empanadas, the dough they use is exquisite, rich and crumbly, the filling spicy and flavorful. Boss fries, too. Apparently they have live jazz every Saturday night, from nine to midnight.

That evening we took our first train out of the neighborhood, to Times Square and a Broadway show. Following a brief return to the Rum House, we headed to the James Earl Jones Theatre to see Liberation by Bess Wohl. The play is an exploration of second-wave feminism, told from the point of view of a contemporary woman who is trying to investigate and understand the C.R. (consciousness raising) group her mother had organized in an Ohio recreation center in 1970.

Felix Empanadas

During intermission my wife and I discussed the framing device, and whether or not the personal details of the story are fact or fiction. The piece rings with truth, but it is the manner in which we enter the play, with the narrator engaging the audience directly – very directly, in fact, responding to specific audience chuckles or even verbal responses – before leading into the performance in which she makes clear when (and when not) she is playing the role of her own mother.

The actor is not the playwright. But we are meant to assume that she is. In this very effective way, we believe what we are seeing and hearing are things that actually happened, in spite of the very obvious artificiality of theatrical performance. If there were no such narrator, if the members of the group simply entered and performed their parts and there were no narrator, we might assume it is entirely fiction. Historical fiction. Accurate, but not true.

The narrator tells us it is true, and so we believe her, even though there is no other reason to believe that it is. But I want to believe that it is. An emotional work, presenting the arguments that were present then, many of which we are still debating now. It highlights the progress that has not been made, but also that which has. Liberation is an epic play, it is powerful, and it is, ultimately, hopeful.

So, it is interesting. The night before we saw a performance based on Poe's The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar which, in its original publication, was perceived as a kind of hoax — fiction presented as fact. This night we saw a piece inspired by true events, and presented with a verisimilitude that transcends its artifice. And the next night we would experience a forty year old musical which has much more recently been revised to include moments of actual historic geopolitical intrigue.

Vero nihil verius, nes pas?

To be continued.