by Eve Ensler

A Playgoer's Guide

Eve Ensler says:
 

I was worried about vaginas.  I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don’t think about them…So I decided to talk to women about their vaginas, to do vagina interviews, which became vagina monologues.  I talked with hundreds of women.  I talked to old women, young women, married women, single women, lesbians, college professors, actors, corporate professionals, sex workers, African American women, Hispanic women, Asian American women, Native American women, Caucasian women, Jewish women.  At first, women were reluctant to talk.  They were a little shy.  But once they got going, you couldn’t stop them.

The author

EVE ENSLER is an award-winning playwright, poet, activist, and screenwriter.  Her many works for the stage include The Depot, Floating Rhoda and  the Glue Man, Extraordinary Measures, Ladies, and Scooncat and Lemonade.  Her play Necessary Targets has had  benefit performances on Broadway, at the National Theatre in Sarajevo, and at The  Kennedy Center and in London.  Her newest play,  Conviction, was commissioned by Music-Theatre Group and was performed at the Berkshire Theatre Festival.  The Vagina Monologues won a 1997  Obie Award and was nominated for Drama Desk and Helen Hayes awards.  The  world tour of The Vagina Monologues initiated V-Day, a global movement to stop  violence against women.  Ms. Ensler's best-selling book of The Vagina Monologues  was published by Villard Books.  Necessary Targets and her new book, Points of Reentry will also be published by Villard.  The 1999 recipient of the Guggenheim Grant in Playwriting, Ms. Ensler is currently writing a screenplay on women in prison for Glenn Close.

Ensler grew up in Scarsdale, New York. Her father, a food-industry executive, abused her sexually and physically until she was 10; her mother was aware of the physical abuse, but too scared to intervene. A drinker in high school, she was 'a raging lunatic' by the time she reached Middlebury College, Vermont. She wrote a thesis on suicide, was accepted at Yale Drama School, bu couldn't afford to go. After college she drank and drifted. At 24 she sobered up and began writing for the theatre. She married bartender Richard McDermott and adopted her son Dylan, eight years her junior, who introduced her to his acting teacher, Joanne Woodward. Ensler wrote Woodward a play, The Depot, the performance for which proved a turning point: 'My life changed forever,' says Ensler. 'It was the first time I ever found a way to bring my politics and my art self together.' A year later, in 1988 she divorced McDermott. Ensler has written about nuclear disarmament (The Depot), homeless women (Ladies) and Bosnian refugees (Necessary Targets), but it is the Monologues for which she is feted. The play premiered in SoHo theatre in 1996, and has propagated a worldwide movement campaigning to end violence towards women.

Social impact

It is undeniable that The Vagina Monologues has had an immense impact on the feminist movement as well as society as a whole. The play's popularity is almost unequalled, having been performed professionally in twenty-five countries over the course of 2001, in such diverse places as Zaire and Antarctica. It has also been performed by the Manila-based New Voice Company, who have performed the play in its original English all across southeast Asia, and are currently translating the play into the native language of the Philippines, Tagalog (Catharine Diamond, "How Do You Say That In Tagalog?"American Theatre 18:7, 82-84. In addition, it favourite piece for University campus theatre groups. It has also been performed by several celebrities, such as Whoopi Goldberg, Glenn Close, Rosie Perez, Jane Fonda, Calista Flockhart, Oprah Winfrey, Kate Winslet, and a host of others (Molly Irvine, "Body Bard" Time 158:11 [9/17/2001] 66-67).

However, one of the most important impacts Ensler's play has had is a cultural one. Ensler has mentioned that one of the goals of her play was to return to an earlier type of feminism; one that stands for sexual liberation and enjoyment, and one which is not afraid of having fun. This idea is evident in the humorous elements of the play, as is Ensler's belief that it is essential to "widen the circle"; to create a broader, more open community among women, as well as remove the shame some women have about their vaginas (Irvine, p.66). It would appear that Ensler is well on her way to achieving the goals she set out in writing The Vagina Monologues. As she pointed out in an interview with Emily Polk, it is now possible to say "vagina" in public conversation when, only a few years ago, it would have been taboo. In addition, Ensler has succeed in getting people to talk about The Vagina Monologues and its subject matter, whether they agree with Ensler's opinions and methods or not (one such example is Allan Fotheringham's article in Maclean's (114:4, 48). Nonetheless, people are still talking and discussing the subject matter, and that is always a step towards change.

Some Reviews:
 

Yes, it's impossible to imagine a more horrendous title. Get over it. There's not an icky, eye-rolling moment in Eve Ensler's simply spectacular one-woman show about, well, you can guess. Ensler's characters, who range from an attorney-turned-sex therapist to an old broad from Queens, speak on the subject in alternately funny, poetic, and provocativ voices. The highest recommendation of Ensler's wit? The roars of laughter from the estrogen- challenged half of the audience.

A radical in red lipstick and cowboy boots, Ensler is a playwright and lifelong activist who seeks to fundamentally change the secrecy and shame that surrounds women's bodies. She is a survivor of parental abuse herself. She exudes warmth, wit, and singular sense of verve.

"The Vagina Monologues" is precisely what its name suggests — a series of stories, based on interviews, in which women talk about the most secret part of their bodies. But it's a great deal more. For what Ensler shows so triumphantly is that by opening up such a subject, you can also reveal a whole range of human experience.