The trouble with most “issue” plays is the characters seem more like animated talking points, rather than complex, flesh-and-blood human beings. Fortunately, Bess Wohl’s Liberation (at Roundabout’s Off-Broadway Laura Pels Theater) does not fall into this trap. Wohl addresses the feminist movement, where it has succeeded and where it has failed. You might suspect from the play’s basic structure; she would employ a checklist of stereotypes to examine the different aspects of the topic. But each of her characters is a unique individual.

Wohl begins with what appears to be a fairly obvious device: a narrator, Lizzie, greets the audience while the houselights are still up and explains she will be leading us into a memory play about a 1970s female consciousness-raising group founded by her mother, also named Lizzie. “We’ve lost something,” the 2025 Lizzie tells us, “and how do we get it back?” The implication is that recent years, the women’s quest for equality is moving backwards, best exemplified by the new Trump administration and its rejection of the concept of DEI in the workplace. But there’s also a personal dimension. By reenacting her mom’s early forays into the Women’s Lib movement, Lizzie hopes to find out why her parent chose the path of traditional marriage and motherhood and did not continue on the road to individual identity.

Lizzie plays her own mother in the flashbacks (once the lights have dimmed) and the other members of the group could easily have been characterized as types, but Wohl adds depth to all with telling details and ambivalent motivations. There’s Margie, the conventional housewife who has been performing domestic duties for her entire adult life and is ready to cut her husband’s throat. That’s a joke, she laughs, but is it really? Attractive Dora is subjected to humiliating male chauvinism at her wine-selling job and feels pressure to marry. Radical African-American activist Celeste struggles with her identity as a black woman within a predominately white movement. Rootless Susan lives in her car, having been rejected by her family, and finds her ultimate freedom on a beloved motor-bike. Fiery Isidora is an Italian immigrant trapped in a green-card marriage, ready to explode the oppressive patriarchy by any means necessary. Harried mom Joanne appears to reject the group’s intentions, but she has several valid points to make and plays a deeper role than you might expect. And there is Lizzie herself (the mother) torn between a career in journalism (though she is relegated to covering weddings and obituaries) and marriage with Bill, the sole male in the play.

Wohl gives each character full weight and as does Whitney White with her balanced and insightful direction. Even a group nude scene where the members share their likes and dislikes about their bodies is handled with sensitivity (Note: audience members must seal their cellphones in locked pouches before the performance to prevent any unauthorized photos.)

The ensemble cast is tight-knit and fully invested in their roles. Susannah Flood carries off the difficult assignment of differentiating between the daughter-narrator and the mother with aplomb. White’s crystal-clear direction, aided by designer Cha See’s shifts in lighting, is especially helpful when the action changes between the present and the past, also when the characters break the fourth wall and engage the audience directly. There’s never any confusion to what time period or location we are in. Qween Jean’s accurate 1970s costumes and David Zinn’s evocative gymnasium setting place us in the right environment.

Betsy Aidem’s warm and witty Margie, Irene Sofia Lucio’s volcanic Isidora, Kristolyn Lloyd’s conflicted Celeste, Audrey Corsa’s plucky Dora, Adina Verson’s edgy but vulnerable Susan, Kayla Davion’s surprisingly layered Joanne and Charlie Thurston’s sympathetic Bill complete the estimable ensemble of Liberation.

Jordan Harrison’s The Antiquities, a co-production of Playwrights Horizons, Vineyard Theater and Goodman Theater, another ingenious time-shifting play addressing a huge issue, but the scope is much broader than Wohl’s Liberation. Harrison’s stunning and innovation piece encompasses four centuries and the question of human survival itself in the face of artificial intelligence. The ingenious premise places us in a museum of artifacts from the “late human” period assembled by the inorganic inhabitants of the far future. A versatile cast of nine enact short vignettes chronicling humanity’s fraught relationship with technology from Mary Shelley’s creation of the Frankenstein monster to the rise of sentient, non-organic intelligence and the extinction of flesh-and-blood people.

Harrison’s intricate jigsaw puzzle of a script connects each of the brief scenes with a particular machinal development progressing forward to the end of humanity and then backwards to Shelley inventing her terrifying tale by a fireside. The play is so out-of-the-box it resembles the magnificent unconventional structures of Tom Stoppard and Caryl Churchill with scary touches of sci-fi and horror. Directors David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan smoothly stage the short vignettes seamlessly, with the aide of Paul Steinberg’s flexible set, Tyler Micoleau’s haunting lighting and Brenda Abbandandolo’s century-spanning costumes.

The cast switches multiple roles with dexterity. The pieces are all brief but the characterizations are full of subtext. A boy in the industrial revolution is given up by his poverty-stricken father to work in a dangerous factory. Two sisters debate getting plastic surgery and a brain-implanted computer chip. A grieving mother angrily cries her dead daughter confided in a vlog more than to her parent. We can read the unspoken conflicts on the cast’s expressive features. Cindy Cheung, Andrew Garman, Kristen Sieh, Marchant Davis, Julius Rinzel, Ryan Spahn, Layan Elwazani, Aria Shaoghasemi and Amelia Workman bring these diverse and shattering stories to vivid life and Harrison cleverly rise the frightening specter of the monster artificial intelligence and the dangers it presents.

Liberation: Feb. 20—March 30. Roundabout Theater Company at the Laura Pels Theatre/Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater, 111 W. 46th St., NYC. Running time: two hours and 20 mins. including intermission. roundabouttheatre.org.

The Antiquities: Feb. 5—March 2. A co-production of Playwrights Horizons, Vineyard Theater and Goodman Theater at Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St., NYC. Running time: one hour and 40 mins. with no intermission. playwrightshorizons.org.