By EDWARD RUBIN
Eve Ensler’s groundbreaking play, The Vagina Monologues, first came to the attention of New York audiences when it opened Off Off Broadway in 1996. Since then it has been published in 48 languages and performed in over 140 countries.
Fashioned from some 200 interviews Ensler conducted among women from all walks of life and ethnicities, the play openly deals with sex, sex work, body image, love, rape, menstruation, female genital mutilation, masturbation, birth and orgasm. A recurring theme throughout the monologues is the vagina as a tool of female empowerment, and the ultimate embodiment of individuality. Originally performed by Ensler herself, The Vagina Monologues eventually morphed into casts of many actresses, some unknown and others famous, each telling the story of one woman.
Over the last 20 years, between performing and writing, Ensler has amassed a boatload of honorary degrees, fellowships and awards including a 1996 Obie for Best New Play and a Tony in 2011, the Isabelle Stevenson Award, for her “substantial contribution of volunteered time and effort on behalf of humanitarian, social service, or charitable organizations.”
On the activism front, Ensler founded V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls, which has raised over $100 million to date in support of thousands of programs and safe houses. V-Day, celebrated on Valentine’s Day, enjoyed its 15th anniversary last month and the sixth year of One Billion Rising, a global day of action on which people in 207 countries rose up and danced for the freedom, safety and equality of women. Ensler has also worked with women in Bukavu, Congo to establish City of Joy, a center for survivors of gender violence.
With In The Body of The World, a theatricalization of her homonymous 2013 book at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s New York City Center (running through March 25), Ensler returns to the stage with a vengeance. Animatedly, she relives her early growing up years, her relationship with her younger sister, her relationship with her father (who appears to have molested her), her distant mother (who was more interested in maintaining her own hairdos and driving around in a convertible than raising her), her two marriages and her becoming a mother to an adopted son, we observe Ensler at her best in her so-called normal and healthy years.
And then, out of the blue, for both the audience and the playwright, comes “The Big C” shocker, or as Ensler calls it “The Big T,” which stands for a stage-four tumor that was found in her uterus. For the next hour and 20 minutes, through 27 geographically-scattered scenes, our eyes are glued to the stage as we follow Ensler in, out, and through, numerous doctors’ offices, hospitals (Sloane Kettering, the Mayo Clinic, and Beth Israel), several major operations, and her chemo treatments. It is a harrowing and highly detailed account of her battle with cervical cancer – currently in remission – in which everything, save for her heart and brain which are obviously large and generous – was either surgically removed or reconstructed.
Missing and or reconstructed, after a nine hour operation are “her rectum, sections of colon, uterus, cervix. ovaries, fallopian tubes, a little bit of her vagina and some 70 nodes.” And what’s new? “A rectum made out of my colon. A stoma, a red gooey nipple now magically outside my body, directing my poop into a temporary ileostomy bag. My face, which is now the size of two faces, and a catheter in my bladder.”
Interspersed between highly detailed descriptions of her many examinations, treatments, and surgeries – and there are a lot of them – we mentally follow Ensler to the African jungle, as she tells us about the countless rapes and murders of Congolese women by soldiers. We hear about an 8-year-old whose vagina is torn apart by multiples rapes, and an 80-year-old woman whose legs are broken as the rapist forces her legs behind her head. Everything is told forthright without exaggeration, or for that matter, any dramatic flair. It’s just the painful facts.
Though in your face, Ensler, as her story demands, is honest to a fault. She is humanity unvarnished. There is no self-aggrandizement. No crying in her beer. No feeling sorry for herself. We are just given the facts with little embroidery, and along with her we deal with them. A Buddhist at heart, Ensler is a practicing thinker and a self-questioner of great depth. In every story she tells she seems to cover all of the bases, often with a sprinkling of humor, which lessens the pain of what we are hearing, no doubt for her as well as her audience.
When faced with cancer she asks herself “Why Me? How’d I get it? I gave up smoke and drinking decades ago. Was it tofu? I ate a lot of fucking tofu. Was it failing at marriage? Twice? Was it talking too much about vaginas? Was it worry every day for 56 years that I wasn’t good enough? Lawn pesticides? Chernobyl? It travelled far. Was it my father dying slowly and never bothering to say goodbye? Was it bad reviews? Good reviews? Being reviewed? Was it sleeping with men who were married? Was it my husband sleeping with my close friend? TAB? Oh my god, I drank a lot of TAB when I first got sober.”
In one extremely moving tear-triggering scene, Ensler takes a plane to see, as it turns out for the last time, her dying mother. “I feed my mother chocolate ice cream and want to believe there was a time she did this for me. I have no memory of her putting food in my mouth. I hate her. Here having climbed out of my chemo cocoon to fly south, taking care of her, hoping she would one day feel compelled to take care of me. I am shocked that she doesn’t pause when I enter her hospital room to say, ‘My god, Eve, you came. You flew here in the middle of chemotherapy to be with me. Instead in her gradually descending dementia from her third bout with cancer, she talks about how much she loves my hair.'”
“I want to scream. Are you looking at me, me, me? I am bald. Feel it; feel my head. There is nothing there. There is no hair. I have cancer, Mom. I just had half my organs removed. I have bloody poison in every pore and I could die and I am not 84. I am 56 and I got on an airplane and risked infection because my white blood count is very low. I risked my fucking life to fly here for you, you, you,”
She pauses. “But I don’t say that. No, I never do. I laugh and pull at my non-existent hair.”
Surprisingly, in view of the subject matter, the play, beautifully directed by Tony winner Diane Paulus (Pippin) and artistic director of the American Repertory at Harvard, is full of love, warmth, and hope buoyed by both Ensler’s writing and performance.
A saving grace of the production is the combined technical genius of Myung Hee Cho (scenic and costume designs), Jen Schriever (lighting design), M.L. Dogg & Sam Lerner, Finn Ross (production design), and Jill Johnson (movement), which held everything in place.
For those who are curious, In the Body of the World, does have a happy ending with the now cancer-free Eve actively back in the game, theatrically and politically. Ensler’s parting words to the audience, which gives everyone a booster shot as they leave the theater, says it all. “Having cancer was the moment I was forced to let go of everything insignificant, to release the past and be burned down to the essential matter. It was there I found my second wind. The second wind arrives when we think we are finished, when we can’t take another step, breath. And then we do.”
In the Body of the World opened on February 6, 2018 following previews that began on January 16; it is slated to run through March 25, 2018 at the Manhattan Theater Club, 131 West 55th Street, in New York. The running time of the show is one hour and 20 minutes with no intermission. Directed by Diane Paulus, the show stars its author Eve Ensler. Set and costume design by Myung Hee Chor; lighting design by Jen Schriever; sound design by M.L. Dogg and Sam Lerner; production Design by Finn Ross; movement byJill Johnson; and production stage manager: Katie Ailinger. For more information check the website.