Necessary Targets

By Richard Zoglin

One would like to think that art is not gender specific. Women should be able to appreciate a testosterone-drenched Tarantino film, just as guys ought to feel O.K. sneaking a few tears at the latest Susan Sarandon sudser. But any man who braves the theater for a performance of The Vagina Monologues had better be prepared. Eve Ensler's play is a series of monologues based on interviews with real women on the subject of their most intimate body part. There are lists of answers to "empowering" questions ("If your vagina could talk, what would it say?") and harrowing first-person accounts of sexual abuse; diatribes against gynecological exams and reveries about genital hair. It's enough to make you want to go home, grab a brew and watch Monday Night Football.

But let's get liberated. The Vagina Monologues, which has been staged around the world, most notably with an all-star cast in New York City last year, is now off-Broadway, being performed solo by its author. Shorn of the somewhat overbearing I-am-woman-hear-me-roar vibes of the celebrity-studded version, its strengths as a one-woman show become apparent. Sitting on a stool with only a few lighting effects for embellishment, Ensler can soar to Rabelaisian heights (giving a bravura impression of every type of orgiastic moan) or move us with quiet compassion (a woman in her 70s describes the embarrassing episode as a teenager that all but ended her relationship with the place "down there").

"My drive as an artist has always been to look at areas that are right in front of us that no one wants to look at," says Ensler, 46, who began interviewing women for The Vagina Monologues after she was "shocked" at the way a friend talked disparagingly about her own sex organ. The work has become the centerpiece of an annual effort on Valentine's Day to raise money to fight violence against women. "You know when your life mission shows up and you can no longer avoid it," she says. "I suddenly realized I had to do something major."

Life missions seem to come as easily to Ensler as gag lines to Neil Simon. She has written a one-woman show about nuclear disarmament and another based on the stories of homeless women. Her play Necessary Targets, drawn from the accounts of Bosnian rape victims, was performed in January at Washington's Kennedy Center in front of Hillary Clinton. Next year she is planning to tour in a new piece, Points of Re-Entry, about the ways women mutilate their bodies to satisfy cultural norms, from Thai women who wear heavy metal braces to elongate their necks to American teens who starve themselves to stay thin. She visited Oklahoma City after the bombing of the federal building ("Timothy McVeigh to me is a fascinating character") and spent 10 days last summer in Kosovo gathering stories about women's experiences during the war ("I came back and just cried for a week"). This is not a woman short of dinner-table conversation.

Her political activism blossomed out of a troubled youth. She has described being abused physically and sexually by her father while growing up in Scarsdale, N.Y. She turned to alcohol in high school and, after Middlebury College in Vermont, wandered the country in a haze before cleaning herself up and starting to write. Her social-activist pieces keep coming; Borrowed Light, an evening of the writings of women prisoners that she conceived and directed, was given a benefit performance in Manhattan last week. Yet she has branched out into less didactic theater too. Her play Lemonade, which just opened at Houston's Alley Theatre, is an elusive, Pinteresque drama about a strange man who shows up in a woman's kitchen hiding a secret.

Married once and divorced (she has legally adopted her former stepson, actor Dylan McDermott), Ensler has channeled her political activism into more conventional arenas as well, making friends with the First Lady and joining her exploratory committee for the U.S. Senate race in New York. "I feel like Hillary Clinton has the potential to be a true leader of women," she says, "to really speak our voice." Until then, Ensler is speaking it loud and clear. "When people come out of the theater, women and men, this enormous energy gets liberated," she says. "I really believe that is the energy that will keep this planet going." She may not save the world, but what other playwrights even think of trying?