THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES

Proceeds to benefit Planned Parenthood and Women of Nations

An Obie Award-winning whirlwind tour of a forbidden zone, The Vagina Monologues introduces a wildly divergent gathering of female voices, including a six-year-old girl, a septuagenarian New Yorker, a vagina workshop participant, a woman who witnesses the birth of her granddaughter, a Bosnian survivor of rape, and a feminist happy to have found a man who “liked to look at it.”

“If Ms. Ensler is the messiah heralding the second wave of feminism, and a lot of people think she is, it is partly because she’s a brilliant comedian…The audience…was overwhelmingly adoring.” [New York Times]

“The most exhilarating part is, no kidding, her extremely virtuosic way with a series of orgasmic moans…Ensler, a writer-performer with a good-natured but seriously evangelical mission about this body part, must be enjoying her success in getting the word out on such a legendarily unmentionable, mythologized and misunderstood fact of life…” [NY Newsday]

“Ensler breaks taboos by talking, talking and talking some more—stripping fear and shame from what she celebrates here. It makes for quite a party. Funny, outrageous, emotionally affecting, and occasionally angry…The Vagina Monologues confront words to demystify and disarm them. In so doing, Ensler disarms the audience too.” [Associated Press]

“Spellbinding, funny, and almost unbearably moving…Written with a bluntness that is nevertheless intensely lyrical, it is both a work of art and an incisive piece of cultural history, a poem and a polemic, a performance and a balm and a benediction.” [Variety]

The Vagina Monologues is an episodic play written by Eve Ensler which ran at the Off Broadway Westside Theatre after a limited run at HERE Arts Center in 1996. Ensler originally starred in the production which was produced by David Stone, Nina Essman, Dan Markley, The Araca Group, Willa Shalit and the West Side Theater. When she left the play it was recast with three celebrity monologists. The play has been staged internationally, and a television version featuring Ensler was produced by cable TV channel HBO. In 1998, Ensler and others, including Willa Shalit, a producer of the Westside Theatre production, launched V-Day, a global non-profit movement that has raised over $75 million for women’s anti-violence groups through benefits of The Vagina Monologues. [Wikipedia]