Tony Awards 2026: Bess Wohl's Pulitzer-Prize-winning 'Liberation' is crowned best play

Bess Wohl’s “Liberation” has won the Tony Award for champion caller play — a validation not conscionable of her enactment but of the discernment of Tony voters.

A playful enactment of humanities reclamation, it re-creates a women’s consciousness-raising radical astatine an Ohio recreation halfway successful the 1970s. The play, which received the Pulitzer Prize this year, was hands down the champion enactment I work oregon saw since past year’s Pulitzer and Tony winner, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Purpose.” (Both dramas are portion of the Geffen Playhouse’s adjacent season.)

But “Liberation” wasn’t a shoo-in, by immoderate chance. The play closed successful February, putting it astatine a disadvantage with Tony voters whose theatergoing typically kicks into precocious cogwheel successful the spring. To marque matters much uncertain, Mark Rosenblatt’s Olivier-winning “Giant” and “The Balusters, David Lindsey-Abaire’s satiric drama connected vicinity authorities successful an property of ideological guerrilla warfare, had their champions.

“The Balusters,” would beryllium a beardown awards contender successful immoderate season. As would “Little Bear Ridge Road,” Samuel D. Hunter’s savagely unsentimental survey of an estranged aunt and nephew picking done the wreckage of their household history. Hunter’s play had the added payment of a magnificently calibrated accumulation by Joe Mantello that provided a cleanable showcase for Laurie Metcalf’s astringent brilliance. “Giant,” which comes packaged successful Nicholas Hytner’s impeccable accumulation led by an unflinching John Lithgow, is likewise elevated by its staging, making it hard to abstracted the playwright’s excellence from the director’s.

By contrast, “Liberation,” which was directed with captivating brio by Whitney White, near nary doubts astir the exceptional prime of the writing. At a clip erstwhile women’s rights are alarmingly being rolled back, Wohl, who’s lone the 3rd solo women playwright to triumph this award, turned her attraction to the procreation of women earlier her — women similar her mother, whose improbable combat for equality revolutionized the satellite successful ways that were hard to ideate backmost successful the 1970s and are inactive challenging the stubborn patriarchal presumption quo.

At a clip of societal fracture and backsliding, “Liberation” offered audiences the accidental to commune collectively with a watershed movement. Reminding america of the messy yet indispensable enactment of grassroots activism, the play administered the equivalent of a governmental oxygen mask. But adjacent much important, it reminded america that past is an indispensable instrumentality for shaping the much equitable aboriginal we anticipation to inhabit.