One of the many memorable moments from “Town Bloody Hall,” the celebrated debate about feminism that took place in 1971 and was captured on film by the documentarians Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker, comes almost at the end. The chaotic, cacophonous evening, held at the New York City Town Hall, has consisted of an encounter between a panel of women—cultural critics Diana Trilling, Germaine Greer, and Jill Johnston, along with Jacqueline Ceballos, who was the president of the New York chapter of NOW—and a snarling, acerbic Norman Mailer. The event has played out in front of a delighted, often outraged audience, among them many of New York’s most prominent literary and critical figures of the era. When questions are invited from the audience, Susan Sontag rises and, in a reasonable, even friendly voice, says that she has a “very quiet question” for Mailer. Why, she asks, did he introduce Trilling as “our foremost lady literary critic?”

“I don’t like being called a ‘lady writer,’ Norman,” Sontag went on. “It feels like gallantry to you, but it doesn’t feel right to us. It’s a little better to be called a woman writer. I don’t know why, but, you know, words count.”

This moment is not among those included in the Wooster Group’s dramatization and reinterpretation of the debate, “The Town Hall Affair,” which is currently running at the experimental company’s theatre in SoHo. But it captures something important about the conversation not just between the participants in the debate—which was staged for maximum controversy by the Theater for Ideas—but between the early nineteen-seventies and the latter twenty-teens. Mailer’s use of the word “lady”—with its archaic resonance, connoting diminishment wrapped in the guise of respect—has gone out of common currency in the four and a half decades since the debate. In recent years, however, the term has been reintroduced by young feminists themselves, layered with irony, as a badge of self-identification. We have had lady-blogs, and coy references to lady-parts. “Ladies” has become a term of endearment among female friends, a tongue-in-cheek summoning of sisterhood among a generation for whom the feminism of “Town Bloody Hall” has seemed so distant as to be almost quaint.

“The Town Hall Affair” uses technology combined with bravura performance to bridge the gap between the early seventies and the present. Video screens play extended clips from the debate with the volume turned low, while the company’s actors speak the words, synchronizing them to the video—an accomplished kind of ventriloquism, complete with ums, ahs, and stumbles. Kate Valk, one of the Wooster Group’s co-founders, plays Jill Johnston, who delivers an unruly, ecstatic paean to self-love and lesbianism: “I want she . . . who is the cunt and the balls and the breasts of me.” Maura Tierney plays Germaine Greer, queenly in a sleeveless dress and fox-fur stole, delivering a stirring call on behalf of the woman artist. “No woman yet has been loved for her poetry!” she says. “And we love men for their achievements all the time. What can this be? Can this be a natural order that wastes so much power?” Diana Trilling—impersonated, in a somewhat perplexing casting choice, by the male actor Greg Mehrten—dryly dismisses some aspects of feminist sexual consciousness-raising, suggesting, “As an added benefit of our deliverance from a tyrannical authority in our choice of sexual partners, or in our methods of pursuing sexual pleasure, I could hope we would also be free to have such orgasms as in our individual complexity we happen to be capable of.” (Jacqueline Ceballos, who was less colorful, does not appear in the reënactment.)

Scott Shepherd, Maura Tierney, Ari Fliakos, and Greg Mehrten during a performance of “The Town Hall Affair.” PHOTOGRAPH BY HERVÉ VÉRONÈSE / THE WOOSTER GROUP PHOTOGRAPH BY HERVÉ VÉRONÈSE / THE WOOSTER GROUP

In her memoir “Lesbian Nation,” which is quoted at the beginning of “The Town Hall Affair,” Jill Johnston wrote that she belatedly realized the evening was a stunt—that she was a bit player in the drama that had been intended by its organizers, a staged encounter between Greer, who had earlier been characterized in a Life cover story as a “Saucy Feminist Even Men Like,” and Mailer. But the main object of discussion that evening, as the Wooster Group’s reinterpretation reminds us, was not so much feminism, nor was it what Johnston archly characterized as “the great matchmaking epithalamium of the century,” as it was Mailer himself. The novelist had published the essay “The Prisoner of Sex” in Harper’s, documenting a critique of the feminist movement in general, and of Kate Millett’s recent book, “Sexual Politics,” in particular. Millett declined to debate Mailer—a sensible decision, in retrospect—and the women on stage had been wrangled in her place to represent the movement. In what might have, at the time, seemed a logical choice, but which now looks like an expression of the limitation of imagination that the debate sought to illuminate, Mailer was cast as the evening’s moderator. He was appointed judge and jury, while his real place should have been in the dock.

“The Town Hall Affair” places Mailer in the center of the action, and reframes it as his psychodrama: the would-be dominant male rendered snappish and helpless by the women he seeks to corral. Mailer is played by two actors, Ari Fliakos and Scott Shepherd, who alternate in the lickety-split delivery of his observations, which range from antagonistic to obtuse. (A characteristic example: “There’s been almost no recognition that the life of a man is also difficult and that all the horrors that women go through, some of them absolutely determined by men, even more of them I suspect determined by themselves, because we must face the simple fact that it may be there’s a profound reservoir of cowardice in women which had them welcome this miserable slavish life.”) Intercut with the video images of Mailer in “Town Bloody Hall” are clips from another movie of the era, one that has not enjoyed the durability of the documentary: “Maidstone,” a film directed by and starring Mailer, who plays a filmmaker, Norman Kingsley, who is running for President. Kingsley gets into a physical fight with his brother, played by Rip Torn. (The fight was improvised, and resulted in real injuries to both actors.) As spliced together and enacted by the Wooster Group, this means that Mailer’s two halves, Fliakos and Shepherd, end up rolling around on the floor, wrestling each other.

If this sounds confusing—well, it is, a bit. But the metaphor is clear: Mailer’s efforts to dissect feminism, and to assert his own voice over those of the women on the panel, end up with him foiled, fruitlessly battling with himself. Mailer thinks that his is the voice of reason. He considers himself misunderstood by Trilling; he finds Greer intellectually incoherent; Jill Johnston isn’t worth engaging with. What is most shocking about revisiting “Town Bloody Hall” today—either in the form the Wooster Group presents it, or without their commentary—is the raw misogyny of the language Mailer feels comfortable in using in the public forum that has been provided to him. When Jill Johnston persists at the podium past her allotted time limit—she is on a roll, and the audience is delighting in her performance—Mailer scolds, “Come on, Jill, be a lady.” To a female heckler who challenges him—“What’s the matter, Mailer, you’re threatened ’cause you found a woman you can’t fuck?”—Mailer drops any affectation of politesse. “Hey, cunty, I’ve been threatened all my life, so take it easy,” he replies, the word falling like a schoolyard taunt, or a slap across the face.