Eve Ensler's play, The Vagina Monologues comes to the Sundance Film Festival direct from its sold-out New York engagement. "Spellbinding, funny...almost unbearably moving" are some of the rave reviews bestowed on this original solo performance piece.
Clad in a black spaghetti-strap dress and ruby lipstick, Eve Ensler has performed The Vagina Monologues from Oklahoma City to London to Jerusalem to Zagreb. With stories as diverse as her audiences, Eve entertains, stuns, disturbs, shocks, but most of all deeply moves those who listen to the monologues she developed from interviews with over two hundred women.
A conversation with a friend about menopause impelled Eve to create this series of performance monologues as a way to change how that most female of all body parts -- the vagina -- is viewed, discussed, treated, named, and loved. Pelvic exams, lusty dreams, sexual sound effects and anatomy workshops proposing the use of handheld mirrors all come under her humor-laced scrutiny.
Traveling across America and eventually to Bosnia, Eve spent three years talking with women of all ages and lifestyles about their bodies and their vagina-related experiences. Her frank, direct performances of monologues of a Bosnian rape victim, a sexually abused African American teenager, and her eyewitness account of the birth of her own grandchild have caused audience members to cry, to scream, and even to faint.
The Vagina Monologues has grown from a small performance piece in New York City to something of a phenomenon including last season's thousand-dollar-a-ticket benefit in which artists like Glenn Close, Rosie Perez, and Whoopi Goldberg performed the monologues -- a testament to their pertinence and power.
Credits
| Eve Ensler
Panelist | Eve Ensler
Panelist |