Not for women only

[APs photo] “I think when people are laughing, they can hear ideas differently,” says playwright Eve Ensler, right, creator of The Vagina Monologues, joined by Gloria Steinem, left, and Glenn Close, at a party after a benefit performance in February 2001.

By ROBERT HICKS
© St. Petersburg Times
published May 26, 2002

The Vagina Monologues, a series of vignettes about women, their bodies, their lives and thoughts, is funny as well as provocative.

NEW YORK -- Eve Ensler shocked the theater world six years ago with her witty, provocative series of vignettes about women's bodies, spirits and lives in The Vagina Monologues.

The play, back for another run at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center starring Loretta Swit of TV's M*A*S*H starting Tuesday, has achieved worldwide fame for Ensler. It won a 1997 Obie Award in New York and has gone on to tour nationally and internationally. Many celebrities, including Whoopi Goldberg, Glenn Close, Rosie Perez and Calista Flockhart, have performed it in benefit performances to call attention to violence against women. The performances are called V-Day and occur each year on Valentine's Day around the world. Yet the play still stirs up controversy.

"It doesn't matter where they go. At the beginning, there's always controversy," Ensler said. "I know that in Lubumbashi, Zaire, where they just did V-Day, a woman was imprisoned for 10 days for doing it. I know in Stanton, Texas, there was a big scandal when the colleges did it this year. So, yes, it's always stirring up something somewhere."

Ensler hasn't let the controversy thwart her efforts to bring attention to women and social attitudes toward them. Now she's taking the themes explored in The Vagina Monologues one step further in a forthcoming series of monologues called The Good Body, which looks at how women mutilate, shape and transform their bodies to fit in with their cultures.

"I'm looking at how women fix their bodies, whether it's liposuction or scrubbing, genital mutilation, nose jobs or vulva surgery in Beverly Hills," she said. "I've talked to women all over the world."

The Vagina Monologues, now on its second national tour, continues to attract attention for its ability to dig deep into women's innermost thoughts. It's funny and provocative, sexy and sly, political and lyrical. It makes audiences laugh, cry, scream -- and think.

"I think everybody learns stuff," Ensler said. "Particularly about other people's experiences, which often mirror their own. I think women obviously learn about their own bodies, their own spirits and their own lives. But men, I think, by hearing those stories, get another idea of women, another view of women.

"A lot of men have come up to me and said, 'Thank you. I never knew that this was what women lived through.' Men become better lovers. They become more sensitive. I think it's educational, and I think it's inspirational, because no one has ever talked about this before."

Humor is very important to Ensler's ability to tell women's stories, even the deeply serious stories, such as those about genital mutilation in Africa and wartime rape in Bosnia.

"I think when people are laughing, they can hear ideas differently," she said.

"I really see the world as one world. What's happening to women all around the world in terms of violence is the same thing. It's just different manifestations of the same paradigm. It's an essential disregard and disrespect toward women. As long as we don't hold women sacred and value them, we'll feel the same way about the earth and about life."

Ensler got the idea for The Vagina Monologues when a conversation with a friend took an interesting turn.

"It was pure accident," Ensler said. "I was talking to a friend about menopause, and we got on the subject of her vagina. She started to say things that really surprised me. I realized in talking to her that I had no idea what women think about their vaginas. So that led me to talk to someone else, which led me to talk to someone else."

When the play premiered in New York's Soho, Ensler performed it herself as a one-woman show. Three years later, it moved to the Off-Broadway Westside Theatre, where it continues to run with a cast of three women. Since then it has gone on to become a bestselling book and has been filmed for HBO.

Ensler, who turned 49 on Saturday, grew up in the affluent New York suburb of Scarsdale. Ensler says her late father physically and sexually abused her as a child and that has inspired her to fight violence against women.

Ensler drank heavily in high school. At Vermont's Middlebury College, she wrote an undergraduate thesis on suicide in contemporary poetry. Yale Drama School accepted her, but she could not afford the tuition. After college, she drifted across the country until she got sober at age 24 and began writing plays.

She married Richard McDermott and legally adopted his son Dylan, whose mother had died when he was 5. Dylan McDermott is now the star of the hit television series The Practice. Ensler and the elder McDermott divorced, but she remains close to Dylan. She now lives with Israeli psychotherapist Ariel Jordan, whom she met in 1998.

Ensler's plays The Depot, Floating Rhoda and the Glue Man, Extraordinary Measures, Ladies, Scooncat and Lemonade preceded the success of The Vagina Monologues. Her recent play Necessary Targets, which completed its run last week at Variety Arts in New York, is drawn from the accounts of Bosnian rape victims that Ensler interviewed in 1994. It has also been performed at the National Theatre in Sarajevo.

The Good Body, exploring women's obsessions with their appearance, is scheduled to premiere in fall 2003 in New York.

"The consumer culture is so out of control," she said. "I continue to interview women around the world based on stories about how they fix, change, mutilate, hide and bury their bodies. Women, particularly teenage girls in America, reveal a level of self-hatred, their obsession with body images, their incredible competitiveness with each other. Sexuality -- in the middle of all of that -- gets lost."

Theater preview

The Vagina Monologues, starring Loretta Swit, Amy J. Carle and Michele Shay, opens Tuesday and continues through June 2 at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, Tampa. 7:30 p.m. Tue.-Thur., 8 p.m. Fri., 5 and 8 p.m. Sat., 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sun. $22.50-$39.50. A portion of ticket sales goes to the Spring of Tampa Bay. (813) 229-7827 or toll-free 1-800-955-1045; or www.tbpac.org.

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