"The Vagina Monologues" Warmly Received

The Center Stage Theater company performed The Vagina Monologues Sunday afternoon and evening to two sold-out, enthusiastic crowds. (Predictably, the audience was almost entirely female, save for a few cooperative, and likely embarrassed husbands.) The performance was in celebration of V-Day 2010, a movement to end violence against women which, to date, has raised over $70 million for the cause.

Director Jill Jaysen, founder of Center Stage, led the ensemble cast of 26 women, many of whom are local residents. The performers – some veteran actresses, some novices -- included Dani Shapiro, author and Travel + Leisure contributing editor, Jane Green, best-selling novelist and actress Dale Allen (of the one-woman show Our Right Minds).

Eve Ensler's renound play, first performed off-Broadway in 1998, was culled from interviews with over 200 women of all ages and walks of life about their most intimate physiology. The result is a hilarious, poignant, defiant and liberating dissection of our ambiguous relationships with our own va-jay-jays.

The performance opened by asking, "what would your vagina say if it could talk?" A lot, it turns out.

The play covers everything from angry vaginas to the pesky issue of hair to the torture of thong underwear and pelvic exams to reclaiming the C word. "I grew up hating my thighs and my vagina," said one performer. "It made me sick. I pitied anyone who had to go down there."

"I can't talk about down there," said Dee Andrian, the oldest actress of the group. "It's the cellar."

The two-hour play was performed on an all-black set, in all-black costumes with splashes of red and pink here and there. The Monologues were about sexuality, repression, our long collective histories of humiliation over our female organs. It was also a love-in celebrating the multi-purpose, mysterious and powerful vagina. And just in case any owner was feeling inferior to men, they wanted to remind us that the vagina has 8,000 nerve fibers, twice the number of that in male counterpart.

Sandwiched between the humorous monologues were the more political acts. These performances covered women in Afghanistan who are silenced by oppression as symbolized by the burka, the raping of Bosnian refugees, the widespread prevalence of female genital mutilation, and the systemic destruction of female population in Congo where ½ million women have been raped and tortured since 1996.

A local beneficiary, Domestic Violence Crisis Center (DVCC) will receive 90 percent of the production's net profits. The DVCC is the only domestic violence agency serving the communities of Stamford, Norwalk, Westport, Darien, New Canaan, Wilton and Weston.  The remaining 10 percent will go to V-Day's City of Joy, Women of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a campaign to end the rape and torture of women and girls as a weapon of war designed to decimate entire villages.   

Westport's own Jane Green, author of 11 novels including The Beach House, was delightful  in the final monologue. As Eve Ensler herself, Green spoke of witnessing the birth of her grandchild. The colorful, and rather gory description was nicely tempered by Green's charmingly refined British accent. This life-altering experience helped Ensler -- and now, her audiences -- discover an entirely new appreciation for the vagina, an "archeological tunnel."

At the end of the show, the cast took their bow to a standing ovation. And just to prove that they were far from humorless and militant feminists, the actresses presented their male stagehand with a bouquet of pussy willow.

For more information on V-Day, visit: www.vday.org