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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Vagina Monologues Open Taboo Discussion

Let’s talk about vaginas. Or, rather, let’s talk about The Vagina Monologues, a student produced play performed on Valentine’s Day in the Hepburn Zoo.

Writer Eve Ensler ’75 wanted to start a taboo conversation about female genitalia, and she started interviewing women about their views on sex, relationships and violence, compiling a piece that is ultimately a celebration of vaginas and femininity as well as a movement to stop violence against women. The monologues themselves are endearing and whimsical, heartbreaking and powerful, enlightening and shocking. Inspired by interviews with over 200 women of varying ages, ethnicities, nationalities and sexual experience conducted over two decades, the play reveals tales of feminine oppression, liberation, discovery and shame by discussing that most elusive part of the female figure: the vagina.

Premiering in 1996 at the HERE Arts Center in New York City, The Vagina Monologues also enjoyed a limited run at the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts in the same year. Eventually gaining popularity through a word of mouth campaign, the play has been performed at Madison Square Garden and was featured in an HBO television adaptation.

Traditionally performed around the country on Valentine’s Day, the productions usually benefit rape crises centers and shelters for women. All of the proceeds from Middlebury’s production were donated to WomenSafe, an Addison County organization working toward the elimination of physical, sexual and emotional violence against women.

Director Rebecca Coates-Finke ’16.5 became involved in the production through discussions about staging the play with fellow Chellis House Monitors.

“I volunteered [to be director] kind of on a whim,” Coates-Finke said. “I’ve had a solid amount of experience working on shows in the Hepburn Zoo and I’ve worked closely with so many directors I wanted to try my hand at it. Also, I’d never seen The Vagina Monologues and that seemed so wrong.”

One of the first monologues, “Hair,” perhaps says it best. “Vagina” is not an enjoyable word. As the piece points out, it sounds more like a harsh medical instrument than a revered part of the body, and saying it in any context will undoubtedly provoke squirms and blushes of embarrassment from people of any age or gender. The Hepburn Zoo was packed with male and female audience members from ages 18 to 65, and Coates-Finke began the show by informing the crowd that hearing words like “vagina,” “pleasure” and “clitoris” throughout the night did not constitute an emergency. These are words that do not appear in everyday conversation, but The Vagina Monologues aimed to, at least for a few hours, create a forum for open dialogue about a part of the body that has so much effect on women, and indeed, men, but is rarely acknowledged or discussed.

“When Eve Ensler wrote the Vagina Monologues, she tore away the stigmatizing silence surrounding women’s vaginas,” wrote Coates-Finke in the Director’s Note of the program. “She gave a voice to thousands of stories and empowered thousands more to spread them. In this moment…we are adding ourselves and our stories to the many that have come before, and the many still to come.”

As Coates-Finke noted, the show began with a piece written and performed by Jiya Pandya ’17 based on interviews with every member of the cast. Aptly named “The Period Monologue,” Pandya breathlessly exclaimed her 12-year-old excitement at becoming a member of the exclusive ‘club’ of womanhood only to discover that the implications of this transition involved serious mental and physical pain, confusion and maturity. The choice to begin with an original, relatively relatable monologue successfully eased the audience into the rest of the play.

Four narrators, Katie Carlson ’15, Akhila Khanna ’17, Marium Sultan ’16 and Helen Wu ’16.5 provided contexts for each of the monologues, discussing the origin of each piece and adding statistical information when necessary.

Dana Tripp ’14 sat down as if she was about to get a haircut in “Hair,” but she wasn’t talking about the hair on her head. Looking pointedly at the audience, she explained her husband’s request for her to remove the hair around her vagina and her subsequent embarrassment and physical pain. The cheating husband insisted that it would save their relationship, and even a female marriage counselor agreed that everyone must make sacrifices, but in the end Tripp’s character decided that the hair was there for a reason and that it is a personal decision for each woman. The audience was nervous, shifting and looking around for other reactions, but Tripp’s captivating delivery of the monologue successfully captured the attention of the spectators, leaving everyone wondering what else to expect.

In each interview, Ensler asked, “What would your vagina wear?” and “If it could speak, what would it say?” and the responses are peppered throughout the piece.

Two ensemble presentations near the beginning of the play aimed to provide a sampling of responses to these questions. In the second, more memorable piece, the women paired up and formed – what else – visual vaginas, hands stretched up and together and bodies curving inward. As each pair recited a phrase that vaginas said, their bodies moved outward and inward, ‘lips’ opening and closing as the words were spoken. Nervous laughter and squirms were rampant throughout the audience.

Fourteen women comprised the cast of the production, all dressed in black with a few key red accessories. The play included students from many majors united by their interest in feminism and portrayals of the female body. Seven of the actors were international students, a much higher percentage than is usually present in theater productions on campus.

“I’m proud of the women I’ve worked with—or I guess inspired would be a better word,” Coates-Finke said. “They are amazing, brave and bold, and they took risks without hesitation, even though for many of them this type of theater and/or these kinds of conversations are new and can be kind of intimidating.”

Adara Wicaksono ’17 acted the story of a woman in her 60’s who had never experienced an orgasm and only referred to her vagina as her “down there.” In “The Flood,” she recounted with nuanced pain and regret an encounter with a handsome young man from her adolescence, haltingly revealing that she had unwillingly flooded the seat of his car after their first kiss, prompting his judgment and her decision never to enter into relationships again. She remembered with glee her dreams of ‘Marlon and I,” in which she and Marlon Brando went out for dinner dates only for the restaurant to be flooded with water, fish and Marlon’s good friend, Al Pacino, swimming by. The embarrassment and longing caused by her natural bodily reaction was heartbreaking, and raises questions about why women (and men) are so afraid of vaginas.

Lorena Neira ’17 sported pink pajama pants as the rest of the cast circled around her, enraptured by her tale “Because He Liked to Look At It.” The audience was equally enraptured by Neira’s subtle use of humor and insight as she described Bob, an ordinary man who was not smart, interesting, funny or handsome. He was the most ordinary man she’d ever met, she explained, until their chance meeting led to a revelatory bedroom experience. Bob, it turned out, was ordinary in every way except that he wanted to look at Neira’s character - not her face, she soon discovered, but to really look at the essence of her – her vagina. Initially uncomfortable, Neira eventually described her most powerful and connected sexual experience through acceptance of her vagina’s existence and appearance.

Sarah James ’17 recounted another story of empowerment in “The Vagina Workshop,” in which she described her experience at a class full of women as they lay back on mats with mirrors, looking at their vaginas and eventually finding their clitorises.

While this may sound like the most uncomfortable workshop ever invented,  James delivered the monologue with a gentle seriousness that distracted from the awkward nature of the class. For James’ character, finding her clitoris (“I’ve lost it! I’ve lost my clitoris!”, she exclaimed at one point to her instructor) reconnected her to her femininity and allowed her to embrace  her vagina.

In deciding to incorporate multiple players into a dramatized rendition of each of the monologues, Coates-Finke created a more visually engaging theatrical experience, capitalizing on the vivid textual material and individual talents of each involved student. They also broke the mold with these innovative staging decisions, as the play is traditionally presented as a series of “single-actor-on-stage” monologues.

“The play was a little hard to grapple with at first. It’s usually done very informally with women just sitting on chairs to deliver their monologues,  ” Coates-Finke said. “I didn’t want to do that because I didn’t like that from an artistic or aesthetic standpoint, and I wanted the women in the cast to be a constant and active part of every moment in the show.”

In perhaps the most lighthearted monologue of the night, Maeve Grady ’16.5 portrayed “The Woman Who Liked to Make Vaginas Happy,” describing her transition from a corporate tax lawyer to female dominatrix, strutting across the stage in red heels as she described the feeling of empowerment stemming from making women moan. As she culminated her monologue, each of the cast members rested back on their hands, facing away from the audience, each demonstrating one of the many moans classified by Grady, prompting the biggest laughs of the night.  A few of the linguistically describable include the Jewish Moan—Oy, oy—and the Irish Catholic moan—Forgive me, Father!.

Positioned as a stark juxtaposition, Sandra Markowitz ’16  recounted one girl’s traumatic experiences from ages 5 to 16 in “The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could.” Markowitz described a familial rape that caused her to want to hide from her sexuality forever before detailing her “salvation” at age 16, when she was seduced by a powerful, 24-year-old woman who gave her such a positive sexual experience that she felt “healed,” though she never saw the woman again. This monologue originally included the line “If it was rape, it was good rape,” which was removed from later versions. Is it more heartbreaking that she was only able to start the healing process through another form of abuse, or is it a relief that she was able to again confront her sexuality? It is for the audience to decide.

Coates-Finke thinks that though the play is performed from a female perspective about the female body, people of any mature age can benefit from a viewing.

“Male-identified, male-bodied people do not belong in this play because it addresses oppression affecting female-identified people with vaginas,” Coates-Finke said. “But men should be feminists; men should support gender equality; men should seek solutions, and so this play is important in that it is educational and eye-opening for anyone to see. I love that this play is extremely sex-positive and body-positive. A lot of time is spent discussing the ways that our bodies do not function or look the way we want them to, and no time is spent talking about the awesome things they do for us—like sex!”

Celeste Allen ’16 burst onto the stage to confront a word with a mostly derogatory connation, “Cunt.” At the beginning of the performance, she unbuttoned her black dress shirt to reveal a tank top falling above “CUNT” spelled in red tape above the area it described.  Bracing and cold, the word is almost more uncomfortable to say and hear than vagina, but Allen’s alternating rapid and slow patterns across the stage, fluid arm movements and smooth, relaxing voice worked to change that. By the end of the performance, the word did not sound as harsh or jarring. The monologue revealed that a word is only as embarrassing or crass as it is made out to be.

Jingyi Wu ’16.5 closed the show with a performance of “I Was There in the Room,” a monologue penned by writer Eve Ensler about watching her grandaughter’s birth. As Wu poetically described the opening and the motions of the vagina in childbirth, the rest of the cast formed a half-circle in front of her, each woman leaning against the cast member in front of her. As the birth progressed, the circle began to move, waving in and out until Pandya made her way, sitting on the floor, out of the middle. This piece of dance added a powerful layer to the monologue, prompting even more thought about what childbirth really means for the female body.

Talking about the vagina is uncomfortable. Actually, even writing this article was uncomfortable. The Vagina Monologues asks why society is so scared to talk about this part of the female figure and invites women to open up about their own relationships with their vaginas. In sharing their stories, they connect with audiences around the world while bringing attention to the abuse and pain suffered by so many. It’s supposed to be uncomfortable, but Coates-Finke and the cast and crew of the College’s production tackled the task with grace and depth by adding choreography and personal experience. The audience laughed, squirmed and was forced to think, at least for a little while, about a subject that is usually completely ignored, which, in my mind, is a recipe for a great night at the theater.


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