It is, by most accounts, a pretty ridiculous word. Vagina. The scientific name for the long-misunderstood part of the female anatomy makes some recoil, others snicker but mostly catches people off-guard, leaving them slightly embarrassed.
In large part, Una’s production of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues worked to make the audience comfortable with vaginas; not only the word itself, but the sexual organ that, for all its many names, has been grossly misrepresented.
Though a decidedly feminist undertaking, The Vagina Monologues is not a theatrical castration: It is as much about positive self-identification as it is about female empowerment. So forget those male-bashing stereotypes of feminism- this production was for everyone’s edification, even the vagina-less.
Set in the Carlo Auditorium in Tegeler Hall, The Vagina Monologues didn’t focus on theatricalities to portray its message. The presenters all sat on the stage, dressed in black and red, and like Ensler, all barefoot with matching red toenail polish.
The 18 women who performed the monologues, though all Saint Louis University students, represented virtually every facet of female society, from a 7-year old African-American girl to an elderly Jewish woman.
The Monologues dealt with different issues relating to the vagina, from menstruation to sexual arousal. The titles “Hair,” “The Flood,” and “Because He Liked to Look at It” should be fairly self-explanatory, though each one addressed issues that are rarely heard in a public forum.
Though The Vagina Monologues should never be called a “heavy” or “light-hearted” work, they are monologues that focused on the abuse that many women endure. Of these, Megan Otte’s reading of “My Vagina Was a Village” was the most powerful.
As she related the story of a Muslim woman raped as a tactic of war, Otte oscillated between the joyful, pastoral view of the speaker’s womanhood before the assault and the foreign stagnation that her vagina had become after the rape.
Other noteworthy monologues include Emmy Jo Pierce’s “My Angry Vagina,” an abrasive, curse-laden assault on gynecologists’ tools, tampons and thong underwear.
The speaker questions the need to “clean up’ the vagina, and asks that it be taken for what it is. Perhaps most memorable was Marianna DeFazio’s “The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy,” concerning a lesbian dominatrix who delights in, well, pleasuring her clients.
DeFazio’s imitation of various orgasmic moans, from the machine gun to the Grace Slick, had the audience in tears of laughter.
The Vagina Monologues was not, and will never be, a great piece of theater. Nor will it be remembered as a stunning literary work. The power of Ensler’s work isn’t in the wordplay or staging, but in mining the rich and untouched realm of women talking about themselves, their sexuality and their vaginas in unusually candid ways.
Una’s production suffered from some under acting and over-emoting, but the presenters were not there as actors; rather, they were surrogates for the countless women who have been misrepresented, abused or silenced by the patriarchy.
Una’s production of The Vagina Monologues was far from revolutionary, but it made the V-word commonplace on SLU’s sheltered and repressed campus, and for that they should be commended.
If nothing else, it is a nice balance to give vaginas some equal representation on a campus decorated with countless phallic symbols.
