Eve Ensler might be credited with writing the play that defines modern womanhood, but the 52-year-old author and star of The Vagina Monologues is not a feminist. At least, so she says. "I'm trying to stay away from 'ist' words these days," she told recess while in North Carolina for the Charlotte run of her new play, The Good Body. But labels aside, Ensler is deeply committed to what many would call the core values of feminism.
"I have been concerned about and devoted to the liberation of women for as long as I remember," she said. "I have seen the devastating effects of the oppression of women all over the world."
Writing gave Ensler a voice to communicate her often-painful observations about the world. "It was a way of maintaining my sanity and make sense of a very difficult childhood, and basically it's been something I've done to keep going," she said.
Ensler's writing first gained national attention when The Vagina Monologues opened on Broadway in 1996, with Ensler reading the monologues. Since then audiences across the country have flocked to local tours and college productions of the play that made it okay to say "vagina" on national television, over and over again.
To Ensler, that's really what the show was all about: removing the veil of mystery and terror that seems to shroud female genitalia.
"The Vagina Monologues is a celebration of vaginas. It's a way of teaching women that they have agency over their vaginas and can control what happens to them and can be free to love them."
Likewise, The Good Body, which comes to Raleigh Nov. 29, is about helping women to see their bodies as assets instead of enemies. In the show, Ensler rants that women are consumed with "piercing, perming, waxing, lightening, covering, cutting, lifting, tightening, flattening, starving-when we could be running the world."
Ensler traveled around the world listening to women tell stories about their bodies. She expected many women to have body issues, but she didn't anticipate what she found: that everyone had body issues. So while women dream of getting skinny, of getting 'there,' the model-thin women they aspire to become dream of something else. "There's nobody 'there.' I've interviewed tons of people; everybody thinks there's supposed to be something else, everybody."
That "everybody" applies to Ensler herself, who turned 40 and hit a wall regarding her own body confidence. The play, therefore, is both a statement on the absurdity of our body obsessions and a love letter to the women everywhere who think that they're the only ones who hate what they see in the mirror. And maybe, somewhere between the talking about it and the accepting it, women everywhere can get over it.
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