ARTS TUESDAY: It's a Whole New V Word

It is sometimes difficult to look at a vagina. Or so Kate G. Ward ’05 was kind enough to demonstrate during the first sketch of the Athena Theater Company’s (ATC) Vagina Monologues , which played through this past weekend at the Agassiz Theater. With the help of Anastasia M. Artemyev ’08 (who held the mirror), Ward bent over backwards in an effort to show everyone just how hard it is for a woman to get a good look at herself.

It was a pithy demonstration that perhaps captured the purpose of the whole production. As a forum for expressing a wide range of opinions and attitudes, Vagina Monologues is a hands-down success. Each of the 20 skits has something different to say about a topic that even college students rarely talk about—and if they did talk about it, they wouldn’t manage to cover half as much territory as this show packs into two hours.

Eve Ensler compiled the Vagina Monologues based on hundreds of one-on-one interviews with women ranging from ages 6 to 72. It can safely be said that there is no other performance piece that gathers into one production the stories of a sexually-abused lesbian rediscovering her ability to experience physical pleasure, a sexually-liberated Englishwoman who has at long last found her clitoris, and a power lawyer-turned-professional-pleasure-giver.

In this ATC production, the performances ranged from polished to mediocre, but all were visibly united in at least one respect. Each woman onstage seemed passionate about giving voice to the viewpoint her own skit represented and comfortable enough to do so without blushing. And their enthusiasm was contagious: there was laughter aplenty and much audience participation. Indeed, by the second act, Chadryn A. Agpalo of the Graduate School of Education, had coddled her ground-floor audience (along with a few brave souls on the balconies) into loudly chanting “cunt!” The chant was part of an effort to establish a positive connotation for the conventionally offensive expression.

Vagina Monologues is written to exploit the guiding principle that the ability to laugh at something, or even just say it out loud, can blunt the edge of the controversial and allow us to confront the unspeakable. Thus, hearing other women’s experiences can, if nothing else, help us to think about our own. In fact, as a woman, it is hard to not to identify with and reflect on two skits (“Hair” and “My Angry Vagina”) that pointedly discuss the unnatural aesthetic standards by which a sex-driven consumer culture measures women.

The production hit tones of hilarity and tragedy. Laurel T. Holland ’06 plays a woman whose husband began cheating on her, supposedly because she refused to shave between her legs. As an awkward hush fell over the auditorium, she told the audience exactly why she didn’t want to. Later in the show, a very different key was stuck when Shawna J. Strayhorn ’07 cracked up play-goers with a rant about the discomforts of tampons, douching, and thongs. She even wondered aloud why lingerie companies don’t sell cotton panties with French ticklers sewn into them.

On a more serious note (and there are many serious notes in the Vagina Monologues ), domestic violence, female genital mutilation, and rape all had time in the spotlight. In “Memory of Her Face,” Sarah K. Howard ’07, Manisha Munshi ’06, and Alexandra C. Palma ’08 spoke about civilian victims of America’s bombings in Iraq. In particular, they mentioned the cases of a Pakistani woman whose husband threw acid on her face. (According to Ensler, 90 percent of these female civilian victims of war die, and no lawsuits have yet been brought.) They further spotlighted the many hundreds of mutilated victims (all women) of a series of murders in Mexico that are suspected to be politically motivated.

The subject matter is by no means easy to swallow. And it is a credit to the production cast that they managed to perform the sobering “Memory of Her Face” and the comedic “My Angry Vagina” back-to-back without seeming downright sacrilegious.

Some may view the Vagina Monologues as the product of an overzealous American feminism, since the commercial oppression American women face may be nothing compared to what women in less economically developed countries must face. However, as an audience member leaving the theatre, I could not help but wonder what would happen if we, even as relatively free American women, all expected more from our own culture. Would we be more actively outraged by what’s happening to other women around the world?

My post-play reflections should assure the VM cast and crew that they did their job and did it well. The success of a production like the Vagina Monologues rests on its ability to provoke discussion, and ATC’s 2005 production surely provoked audiences by skillfully blending the tragic with the humorous to take a good look at a touchy topic.

If readers missed the Monologues this year, be sure to catch it next year on Valentine’s Day weekend. Then think about the V-word in a whole new way.

—Reviewer Emer C.M. Vaughn can be reached at evaughn@fas.harvard.edu.