Bess Wohl's 'Liberation' wins Pulitzer for drama. Could a Tony be next?

Bess Wohl’s play “Liberation” took location the 2026 Pulitzer for play connected Monday, successful a triumph that could bode good for Tuesday’s Tony Award nominations.

“Liberation” is simply a representation play, successful which a girl attempts to recognize her mother’s past arsenic a subordinate of a pistillate liberation radical successful 1970s Ohio. The main character, Lizzie, imagines her mother’s acquisition erstwhile she formed a “conscious raising group” with her friends. The communicative is based partially connected Wohl’s experiences with her ain mother, Lisa Cronin Wohl, who wrote for Ms. magazine.

The play, directed by Whitney White, opened astatine the James Earl Jones Theatre connected Broadway successful October 2025 and ran until February 2026. The amusement is scheduled to unfastened astatine the Geffen Playhouse successful January 2027. Times theatre professional Charles McNulty called “Liberation” “one of the champion plays of the year.”

“The idiosyncratic is political, arsenic the feminist rallying outcry has it, and Wohl has taken pains ne'er to suffer show of this penetration erstwhile imagining the complexities of the lives of others,” McNulty wrote.

This is Wohl’s archetypal Pulitzer win. She besides wrote “American Hero,” “Small Mouth Sounds,” “Continuity, “Make Believe” and “Grand Horizons,” which premiered connected Broadway successful 2019.

There is caller precedent for the play that wins the Pulitzer to besides find itself successful the moving for a Tony. Last year, “Purpose” by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins took location the Pulitzer, earlier receiving a Tony Award for champion play.

“Bowl EP” by Nazareth Hassan and “Meet the Cartozians” by Talene Monahon were finalists for the Pultizer.