Author: Jacob Surpin
As soon as the lights dim in Thorne Hall, the packed auditorium begins to cheer. With the lights still down, the 12 women of this year’s Vagina Monologues make their way onto the stage. They sit on stools arranged in a long horizontal row and face the audience.
The spotlight falls on a cast member. “I’m worried about vaginas,” she says.
The spotlight moves from cast member to cast member. Each adds a statement to the conversation. “There is so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them, like the Bermuda Triangle,” one says, eliciting laughter. “Nobody ever reports back from there.”
As the spotlight continues to move, it becomes more and more apparent that this is not a panel discussion on feminist theory, as the arrangement of the chairs might suggest. “Don’t wear panties, dear, underneath your pajamas,” a cast member says in a New Jersey accent. “You need to air out your pussycat.”
This is a performance, and the audience is hooked.
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Before the Vagina Monologues became a movement, it was a play. Eve Ensler wrote the monologues in 1996 and first performed them in the basement of the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village. The play, based on a series of interviews Ensler conducted with women about their sexuality and experiences of abuse, quickly won acclaim, and Ensler wasted no time spreading its influence.
“I toured the country with it and was overwhelmed by how many women would line up after the show to tell me their stories of survival,” Ensler said via email.
In 1998 Ensler introduced V-Day (Feb. 14) as an annual occasion to fight acts of violence and sexual abuse committed against women. “I came together with a group of committed activists in New York City, and we founded V-Day,” she said. “Since then activists around the world on campuses and in communities have produced benefit productions of the monologues to raise funds for local beneficiaries doing anti-violence work. It is a wild, unstoppable movement,” Ensler said.
Feb. 17 marked Occidental’s ninth annual performance of the Vagina Monologues. While entirely student-run (this year’s presidents are seniors Jordanne Ho-Shue, Andrea Kippur and Tara Skar), Occidental’s chapter takes most of its direction from V-Day, which issues a new spotlight monologue most years. This year’s spotlight monologue was compilation of the previous three, which focused on women impacted by V-Day in the Congo, Haiti and New Orleans.
Occidental’s cast chose not to perform the spotlight monologue this year. “The monologue is pretty abstract because it’s spread across all three places. It’s not strictly what we think is important–it’s about audience involvement at the end of the day, and we thought it would be hard for the audience to conceptualize the monologue,” Ho-Shue said.
The task of organizing the show falls to the student organizers. “We kind of push the rules on the show, and we’re breaking them up in ways that we haven’t before. Keeping the show interesting is always a challenge,” Ho-Shue said.
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Back on stage, senior Kristine Nowlain is having an orgasm. A surprise triple orgasm, to be exact. “Oh, God, that’s really good, don’t stop,” she says. “That’s, oh, that’s it, that’s it. Oh, that’s it.” Her voice is getting more high-pitched, and she has to speak up to be heard over boisterous encouragement from the audience. She grips the corners of her stool and closes her eyes. “Oh my God, oh, that’s really good, oh, that’s, oh my God! Aah!” she says, finishing. She composes herself and closes her script book. The lights dim as the audience voices appreciation.
This is the end of the monologue entitled “The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy,” which focuses on a female sex worker who delights in bringing sexual pleasure to women. She takes particular satisfaction in producing moans, which she replicates for the audience. She demonstrates the ‘clit moan’, the ‘vaginal moan’, the ‘vaginal-clit moan’ and the ‘uninhibited militant bisexual moan’, among others. The audience rolls with laughter throughout, but the biggest cheer comes when Nowlain demonstrates the ‘ResEd moan:’ “Oh, see how many we can fit, yes!”
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Ensler has no doubts as to the source of the Vagina Monologues’ widespread success. “Art has the power to transform consciousness,” she said. “It speaks to people on a cellular level.”
To connect deeply with audiences at Occidental, cast members employ accents, gestures and facial expressions. They stay completely in character, and they pull the audience in with them.
“When you have actual people and actual bodies acting these things out, it’s a lot more powerful than just reading about it in a pamphlet,” cast member Becca Miller (senior) said. “It makes people have to connect emotionally. The monologues make you enter other women’s lives.”
The goal of entering other women’s lives is one reason the play is done through monologues. There is just one character telling her story to the audience, and audience members essentially adopt the role that Ensler played in conducting interviews for the play, listening quietly to women’s most sacred stories. The sense of intimacy can make the atmosphere tense at times, but the cast members think it serves their purposes well.
“I can count on one hand the people who have told me the show didn’t have an impact on them,” Ho-Shue said. “If it doesn’t make you uncomfortable I’d be surprised, but if it doesn’t impact you in a positive way I’d also be surprised. You are pushed to think critically but you also have such a fun time while doing it.”
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Nowlain’s triple orgasm is followed by a short sequence in which the cast dances to popular music to close out Act I. After the curtain closes, audience members turn to each other and discuss the monologues they’ve seen thus far. They’ve been brought through a bit of an emotional roller coaster, from harrowing accounts of intense domestic abuse and the riveting story of a 72-year-old woman’s first orgasm to the exuberance of Nowlain’s orgasms and the release of the intermission. The play has a deft structure, one designed to keep the audience both uncomfortable and highly entertained, and the cast members look like skilled actors, not simply activists masquerading on a stage.
The student next to me, Guido Girgenti (sophomore), is eager for the show to begin again. “I wonder how long the intermission is,” he says.
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Occidental’s cast members try to keep the goal of V-Day—ending violence against women and girls—in mind as they perform, and the goal is also implicit in the play itself, in the stories the play tells and its intimate tone.
“In the monologues, I found a place where it wasn’t so stigmatized to express yourself about things that are generally taboo,” Ho-Shue said. “There wasn’t any sort of prototype to being a woman in the monologues, and they really deconstruct the conception of womanhood.”
Miller agreed. “When I saw the play as a freshman the monologues were empowering because I had never been faced with having to think about my own sexuality,” she says. “It was cool just to hear people say ‘vaginas.'”
Yet while the cast members believe firmly in the power of the actual play, they are sure to augment the play with more conventional forms of activism.
“Even with the play, a lot of what we do is simply taking on an activist role on campus,” Miller said. “We do fundraising, event planning and work with local organizations.”
Most on-campus events take place during the week of Valentine’s Day, and this year, V-Week events included a screening on sex slavery in New York City, an LGBTQ discussion panel, the second-annual Penis Chronicles and a teach-in on sexual violence in Haiti.
In addition to these events, the cast attempts to develop relationships with local organizations. Last semester, the cast members ran a drive for food, money and clothes to give to the YWCA. Ho-Shue acknowledged the difficulty of forming lasting relationships with local organizations when the cast turns over every year, but said it hasn’t stopped the cast from trying.
“We don’t want anything we do to be short-term,” she said. “I think a lot of what we’ve done is make it easy to get involved, but there’s still been a lack of long-term commitment. Trying to build long-term relationships with some of these organizations is where the difficulty has been, and that’s where we want to grow.”
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The audience is silent. Kippur is performing the last monologue, “Fur is Back,” and the tone is starting to verge on antagonistic. “Fur is Back” focuses on an angry woman who has become fed up with the lives around her led in pursuit of parties and denounces party-seekers in merciless terms.
“They don’t listen, they don’t give a shit, no, that’s why they are at the party. That’s why their whole life is a fucking party. Their whole life is directed toward getting invited to the party. Dressing for the party. Getting drunk or laid or into the party mood, and there I am ruining everything,” she says.
There is some nervous laughter from the audience as she speaks, but mostly the mood is strained. All of the other monologues focus on topics far removed from college life: female sex workers, serial rapes in Japan, a struggle for survival in New Orleans. But this one hits too close to home for the audience, and they don’t know how to react.
The monologue culminates when the woman falls to the floor at a party and, in anguish, rails at the apathy of the other participants. As the lights come up the audience claps, but their faces look a little confused. It’s Friday night, they seem to be thinking. Doesn’t everybody go out on Friday night?
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V-Day was created to turn the short-term success of The Vagina Monologues into a lasting international movement to stop violence against women.
“Over the past 14 years, activists from more than 140 countries have worked tirelessly on a grassroots level to demand an end to all forms of violence against women and girls,” Ensler said. “In the face of resistance, and at the intersection of art and activism, they have come together around productions of the Vagina Monologues and other works curated by V-Day.”
And this is where the power of the monologues and V-Day lies: at, as Ensler says, “the intersection of art and activism.” The ongoing performances of the monologues themselves around the world create energy and funds that feed into the mission of V-Day.
Although critics have taken issue with the monologues’ perceived man-hating ethos and problematic simplification of Third World women’s experiences, the results are hard to argue with.
“V-Day organizers have raised consciousness, changed laws to protect women and girls, funded rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters, educated their communities, and raised over $85 million in urgently-needed funds for groups doing the essential work of ending violence and serving survivors and their families,” Ensler said.
Last week, Ensler announced a new campaign, One Billion Rising, which will culminate on the monologues’ fifteenth anniversary next year. The title stems from a statistic often cited by Ensler and Occidental’s cast – that one in three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. “If you do the math,” Ensler said, “then you know that more than one billion will suffer this fate. We are calling on the one billion, and all of those who love them, to gather, strike and dance on Feb. 14, 2013. On that day we will escalate our commitment to doing the work of ending gender-based violence on this planet. Through productions of the Vagina Monologues, through our network of safe houses in places like the Congo, we will keep at it until the violence stops.”
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After the last monologue ends, with the lights up, Kippur steps forward. She asks the audience to stay a moment for an interactive exercise.
“If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual violence, could you please stand up?” she says.
About half of the auditorium stands up. Andrea looks around for a few moments, and the audience does the same.
“Now,” she says, “if you want to pledge to stop sexual violence, please stand up.” The entire auditorium stands up. This is the first time all night we have been reminded that this is a benefit showing and that we are not here merely for entertainment.
“Thank you,” Andrea says, and the cast takes their bows before walking off stage.
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