Giant, talking vaginas. It’s the image that comes to mind when one hears the title Vagina Monologues, and which the play’s opening line intentionally invokes. “My vagina’s pissed off,” the first actress declares, before explaining what her “vagina would say if it could.”
To be fair, the monologues don’t only talk about vaginas: they mention cootie-snatchers, cunts and clits as well. The stories encompass a range of races and economic classes, and touch on issues of sexuality and oppression.
The monologues were first performed in 1996 by their creator Eve Ensler, who played all of the roles herself.
In one particularly amusing monologue, a tax lawyer who has become a professional female escort lap dances and gropes the front-row members of the audience, then proceeds to perform all the different types of orgasmic female moans she can think of. She ends big with the “Georgetown super-fan moan,” which is essentially the fight song followed by the “ROY!” chant.
Since the play’s inception, Ensler has continued to write new monologues so that the piece expands to include new questions about femininity in modern society, and the Georgetown directors decided to include some of these new monologues in their production. One explores the women of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans as “the vagina of the United States” (when times are good we look to her for fun and sex, but when trouble strikes we turn our backs). Another, chosen in light of recent LGBTQ-related events on campus, tells the story of a trans-gendered woman who places self-respect and true love above the complications of gender and sexual orientation.
Though much of the play seeks to create a positive vision of the vagina, some scenes fill the small theatre with emotion, like one account of a Bosnian rape scene involving “a broomstick, glass bottles and rifle barrels.”
All the monologues are intriguing on their own, but the play really comes together when they are layered on top of one another, sometimes with small introductions but frequently without fades between scenes.
Though Take Back the Night’s annual production of the Vagina Monologues has been running at Georgetown for the past six years, this is only the second year in a theater space with lighting.
“Back in the first few years, it was only actresses reading from scripts in Bulldog Alley,” said one of the veteran directors of the play, Laura Brienza (COL ’10). It’s now being staged in Poulton Hall, using minimalist props and costumes in a blackbox theatre with only a red “V” as background. The effect is to create an intense space for the provocative language, emotion and subjects of the monologues.
The cast includes a mix of veteran and amateur actresses, and yet none seemed to struggle with performing flamboyant lines like “I love the word cunt” or “my mama caught me touching my cootchie-snatcher,” which could be especially challenging in an intimate setting like Poulton.
Although the text of the monologues is extraordinarily pro-female, even males can appreciate this heart-felt acting and humorous outlook on female anatomy. “We just want people to leave here and be able to think twice about seeing a girl in a short skirt,” said one of the directors, in reference to one particularly saucy monologue in which the actress contends, “My short skirt is not an invitation, a provocation … it does not mean I am stupid … nor is it a license to rape me.”
The production will donate 10% of its proceeds to V-day, a holiday created by Eve Ensler, that falls on a day between February 1 and March 8 every year. The name “V-day” stands for “victory, valentine and vagina” and celebrates the empowerment of women. The rest of the play’s proceeds will go to My Sisters’ Place, a woman’s shelter in D.C.
