Been There, Done That: Paving the Way for The Vagina Monologues

Been There, Done That: Paving the Way for The Vagina Monologuesl SHELLY SCOTT In her foreword to the "V-Day Edition" of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues , Gloria Steinem writes of her initial reaction to seeing Ensler's performance : "I already know this: it's the journey of truth telling we've been on for the past three decades" (xv). I shared that reaction as a spectator of the monologues , performed as part of the V-Day College Campaign on university campuses for the past three years, and when I sat in a US$SS seat to watch a professional production in Chicago in 2001. The four performances had only the text in common, but audience reactions were very much the same. The standing ovations, the whistles and yells, and the jubilant atmospheres left me wondering about this newly discovered need to jointly celebrate womanhood. What may initially appear as old-fashioned and redundant to those familiar with feminism's theatrical history in the U.S. strikes many in the general pubHe as outrageous and innovative, and they can't get enough. Why is such a need still present in these postfeminist days? and What does it signify that the need is being met through theatre (another old-fashioned notion for some)? If, indeed, The Vagina Monologues is merely echoing what early feminist consciousness -raising groups were teaching in the seventies, why has it now become a political sensation unparalleled in American feminist theatre? Ensler herself writes that the play "happened because it had to happen" (Vagina xxxv). By situating the production within the context of early feminisUheatre collectives and considering audience and perfonners' reactions, I want to uncover the reasons for the piece's success and detennine whether it actually had to happen. By revisiting the impact of consciousness-raising on the feminist theatre movement, I examine how groups like At the Foot of the Mountain and the Women's Experimental Theater made The Vagina Monologues possible and, for Ensler at least, inevitable. The performance history of the monologues - as well as audience and perfonner reactions - provides a Modern Drama, 46:3 (Fait 2003) 404 Paving the Way for The Vagina Mon%glles framework for my argument. While I attend to professional productions, my primary focus is on the involvement of college students in annual campus perfonnances . PERFORMANCE HISTORY The genesis of The Vagina Mon%glles has been much publicized: Ensler had a conversation with a feminist friend going through menopause, who made remarks full of contempt about her own vagina. Shocked and intrigued at such a strong response, Ensler began asking other women she knew how they viewed their own vaginas. Two-hundred interviews later, Ensler was convinced that these stories had to be told and, self-proclaimed storyteller that she is, gave birth to the one-woman show (Lewis 39). Ensler claims that she has no memory of actually writing the monologues (Vagina xxiv). The process of composition has been left a mystery, which she attributes to muses she calls the Vagina Queens, but she will say, "When I do the interview, I take notes. But it's more just letting the person come into me so then I can write the character" (qtd. in "Activist"). Some of the monologues were taken verbatim from interviews, some were written from several interviews combined, and others were constructed by Ensler on the basis of ideas that arose in conversation (Ensler, Vagina 7). The monologues premiered in a small venue in New York in 1996 and moved to off-Broadway in 1997 (Drake, "Advocate" 77; Lewis 40). The show itself as performed by Ensler was a simple affair. Directed by Tony-nominaled Joe Mantello, the one-hundred-minute performance of the Obie Awardwinning text consisted of Ensler, barefoot and dressed in a black gown with spaghetti straps, seated on a stool, holding note cards, and speaking into a microphone, adopting different character voices for the monologues. Ensler has written plays based on interviews before and her activist passion always provides the ideas. She has written onc-woman shows on nuclear disannamcnt and on homeless women and a piece based on interviews with Bosniah rape victims, Necessary Targets. A version...