Bess Wohl capped an extraordinary year on the boards, winning an historic Tony Award on Sunday for authoring Liberation.
Wohl became only the fourth female playwright in history to take that top honor. She scored the Tony just one month after winning the Pulitzer Prize.
Liberation is a memory play set in Ohio that shifts between 1970 and the present day. It also explores second-wave feminism and the complexities of social change across generations. The show began performances on Broadway in October 2025, running through Feb. 1. It was nominated for a total of five Tony Awards, but only cashed in Best Play.
Throughout the Tonys’ near 80-year history, the following female playwrights have won Best Play:
- Frances Goodrich (with Albert Hackett) for The Diary of Anne Frank in 1956
- Wendy Wasserstein for The Heidi Chronicles in 1989
- Yasmina Reza for Art in 1998 and God for Carnage in 2009
While Lucienne Hill did win this category for Becket in 1961, her contributions were for translating the original French text by Jean Anouilh, a man, to English.
Since 2009, the following female playwrights received Best Play nominations, but didn’t prevail:
- Sarah Ruhl for In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) in 2010; lost to John Logan’s Red
- Nora Ephron for Lucky Guy in 2013; lost to Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike
- Danai Guirira for Eclipsed in 2016; lost to Stephen Karam’s The Humans
- Lynn Nottage for Sweat and Paula Vogel for Indecent in 2017; both lost to J. T. Rogers’ Oslo
- Lucy Kirkwood for The Children and Claire van Kampen for Farinelli and the King in 2018; both lost to Jack Thorne’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
- Heidi Schreck for What the Constitution Means to Me in 2019; lost to Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman
- the aforementioned Bess Wohl for Grand Horizons in 2020; lost to Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance
- Dominique Morisseau for Skeleton Crew and Lynn Nottage for Clyde’s in 2022; both lost to Stefano Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy
- Martyna Majok for Cost of Living in 2023; lost to Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt
- Jocelyn Bioh for Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, Amy Herzog for Mary Jane, and Paula Vogel for Mother Play in 2024; all lost to David Adjmi’s Stereophonic
- Kimberly Belflower for John Proctor is the Villain and Sanaz Toossi for English in 2025; both lost to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Purpose
Hilary Mantel was also nominated in this category in 2015 as a co-author on Wolf Hall, but that was more in acknowledgement of her original novels. Mike Poulton was the playwright behind that two-part stage adaptation.
This story was originally published June 1 and updated on June 7.
