Oxy’s Vaginas Perform Pleasurable Night For All

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Author: Linni Kral

Many happy vaginas filled Thorne Hall last Friday, February 20, to witness Occidental’s annual production of The Vagina Monologues. With the addition of a few Obama references and a monologue about New Orleans, the production kept things fresh and different, providing a great show for first-timers and veteran attendees alike.

The show’s creator, Eve Ensler, started the V-Day organization, which seeks to end violence against women. This year, V-Day’s concentration was on the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Ensler will be focusing her organization’s efforts in the coming years. Proceeds from merchandise and ticket sales will go towards the DRC and Children of the Night, a private non-profit organization dedicated to assisting children forced into prostitution for food and shelter.

The show is based on 200 interviews conducted by Ensler in the mid-1990s. Each actress chooses a monologue to perform. These are interspersed with short three-person performances, or “Vagina Facts,” including the fact that the female clitoris has twice the nerve endings found in the penis. This and many more moments were met with raucous applause from an audience comprised of both men and women.

This year’s performance featured a new monologue, added by Ensler in 2008, titled “Hey Miss Pat” about post-Katrina New Orleans and performed by Jordanne Ho-Shue (first-year). There was also an addition to the finale, “The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy,” performed by Sarah Arvey. In this monologue, a dominatrix of other women showcases several different moans, which this year included the “Obama moan”-“Yes we came!”

“The Obama reference was a fun little Oxy addition, one subtle way in which we made the show our own,” Erica Liepmann (senior) said. “And we know Eve [Ensler] loves Obama!”Arvey, Liepmann and Jessica Lobl (senior) are veteran performers of the monologues. The three orchestrated the show and helped pair the girls who auditioned with their monologues.

“We asked each cast member to read the script and write down their top three choices. Erica, Sarah and I went through the lists and tried to match everyone with one of their favorites,” Lobl said. “We thought about whose personality and talents would work best with the pieces before we finalized the show.”

Lobl performed “Because He Liked To Look At It,” a monologue about a woman who doesn’t appreciate her vagina until an ordinary man comes along who appreciates it greatly. Lobl said she identified with the overall theme of the monologue.

While some of the monologues are light-hearted, others take a more serious tone. Liepmann put on an extremely poignant performance of “My Vagina Was My Village,” a compilation of testimonies from Bosnian women in rape camps. Liepmann interjected her monologue with haunting pauses that made the piece difficult to shake afterwards.

The production balanced the two extremes well, spacing out monologues like Liepmann’s with performances like Elizabeth Cutler’s (senior) “The Vagina Workshop.” The monologue follows the story of a woman who attends a workshop and finds her clitoris on a blue mat in a room full of other women. This was Cutler’s first year participating.”I chose ‘The Vagina Workshop’ because of the line that says that the woman is no longer going to wait for someone to come into her life to lead it and make her happy,” Cutler said. “That’s something that everyone, men and women, can relate to.”

Some cast members were not doing their monologue for the first time, as was the case for Ally Jurkovich (senior). Jurkovich performed “The Flood” both at Occidental and as a senior in high school. The monologue is about an old woman who had an embarrassing incident with female ejaculation as a teenager and hasn’t been sexually active since.

The performance was bittersweet for many departing seniors who were performing their last show. However, there were also many newcomers to the program. Sky Mangin (junior) had never seen the show before auditioning this year, but plans to participate next year as well. She performed “Crooked Braid,” a monologue about a Native American woman who catches her husband cheating.

“I was immediately drawn towards the poignant tone of the monologue and after reading the whole script, ‘Crooked Braid’ made me cry the most,” Mangin said.

“If the mood strikes and the opportunity presents itself, I will probably end up back on a stool someday,” Jurkovich said.

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