The Broadway production of Liberation by Beth Wohl will have closed when you read this but worry not, it will be back soon, I predict, on many stages, for it is our best new play in many a year: potent, poignant, important, comic, propulsively theatrical, compelling from start to standing ovation. Its subject is a CR – consciousness raising – group of six early feminists from 1970 to 1973 – their stories, interactions, emotional arcs, how they learn to think politically. It’s about me, too, my college years, my first tentative emergence from the cocoon of conventionality, commonplaces, semi-consciousness.

(Note: I composed this before Liberation won this year’s Pulitzer, which it richly deserved.)

Like many a male back then, I did not so much assert my superiority as assume it. My Edwardian dad subscribed to spiritual, if not economic, primogeniture. Three sisters preceded me, but he’d have kept having kids till the good Lord brought him a BOY. I was, he proclaimed loudly, “the apple of his eye.” Not until grizzled did it dawn on me my sisters might have resented this preference predicated on a penis.

I have always liked women better than guys. I found them kinder, tenderer, more sympathetic, more receptive to my words. That I loved music and art and feelings and hated football made me something of a girly man. An oaf at courtship, my Don Juan attempts were clownish, but I kept trying.

Much as I liked women, I never sensed their plight. In this I was wholly male. Liberation? Liberation from what? That women had to submit to condescension, penetration, procreation, childcare, housekeeping, workplace discrimination, insults and assaults by males might have horrified me if I’d thought about it, but I didn’t. I’ve no rapist in me – I shudder at the thought of forcing myself – violation and humiliation both! – but neither did I notice my advantage. That’s just the way things were.

Wohls’ beautiful play wakens me to my emotional obtuseness. Politically, I’d always ascribed to the principles of feminism: equal opportunity and rights, autonomy, protection from predators. Emotionally I discounted women’s discontent. (“It is easy to bear the misfortunes of others,” observed La Rochefoucauld.) Liberation stung. How blind I had been, what an inadvertent brute.

The Nameless One and his hulking ilk yearn to return women to the subservience of old. More babies! No abortions! Three cheers for trafficking young girls (and keeping incriminating evidence under wraps)! All the women in this administration look like Barbie Dolls. When the Nameless One advocated grabbing women by the pussy, many thought that disqualified him for leader of the free world. Quite the opposite – go figure.

Pussy-grabbers seek to suppress females because they’re scared. Guys’ superior physical strength doesn’t count for much in today’s workplace. Women’s ability to control procreation makes males superfluous. Women’s superior performance in schools assures their rise in the workplace. What’s women’s work today? What isn’t?

Though I feel no sympathy for my gender, I worry our demotion will erupt into fury that destabilizes the state. Unemployed young males can get troublesome fast. Almost ninety percent of murders in America are committed by guys. Beware.

All eight performers on Wohl’s stage writhe with anguish – and cope with humor. No relation is perfect. There will always be a tradeoff between love and freedom. Is marriage bondage – or its own sort of liberation? Are one’s kids a blessing, burden, or both? Living, Wohl suggests, can be overthought. The most we can hope for is less than we hoped – and more than we deserve.

I emerge from the theater, my lady-love on my arm, the luckiest guy alive.