The Vagina Monologues are not a great piece of writing, but they give good space for the type of activism that playwright Eve Ensler shunts around the globe in her quest to give “down there” better press than it’s had previously.
International productions of the play — before it became a religious ritual to mark V-Day — have won awards though, most notably the prestigious Obie.
The stage production has also recently enjoyed sell out runs Off-Broadway and on the West End. So there’s no doubt that the piece says, loud and clear, what women want to hear: that the time of the vagina as a construction of male desire (or revulsion) is over. Women now demand the right to describe their vaginas for themselves, and to each other.
To find out what women have to say about their vaginas, Ensler interviewed two hundred women, from the aged to religious zealots. In her own words, from the stage of Caesars Gauteng, she confessed: “I was worried about my own vagina – it needed a context, a culture, a community of other vaginas. It was like the Bermuda Triangle – nobody reports back from down there.” In her mission Ensler asked her women questions like: if your vagina could speak, in two words, what would it say? If your vagina could dress up what would it wear?
Well, judging from the monologues none of vaginas Ensler interviewed had anything really surprising to say or had any unexpected desires in what they wished to wear. The vaginas would say things like, “slow down” or “feed me”; and they would wear things like flip-flops, tutus, jeans or “Armani only”. Like most of the content, the responses are unsurprising, but that is a feature of what Ensler has tried to achieve – normal responses from normal vaginas.
What was surprising was the turn out last night, to mark V-Day, at Caesars Gauteng. The reception room in which the performance was held was, coincidentally, the same venue used for the negotiations that put apartheid to death in the early 1990s, so there was at least some history being screamed from the walls. The tickets, which benefited POWA (People Opposing Woman Abuse), were expensive yet the auditorium that seated 3000 was virtually full.
Outside there was a bustling lobby with stalls showing everything from cures for vaginal infections to panties sold for charity, donated by a large clothing chain under the slogan, “fashion takes action.”
There was also an exhibition of photo realistic portraits of women by artist Reshada Crouse.
Inside, the stage was bedecked in red swathes, as was the endless stream of actresses, celebrities and activists that included Lebo, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, Annabel Linder, Jana Cilliers, Shaleen Surtie-Richards, Michelle Constant, Dawn Lindberg, Charlene Smith, Thembi Mtshali – the list goes on and on.
Designers who dressed the celebrities included The Boys, Stoned Cherrie, Marianne Fassler, Craig Native and Gavin Rajah. Everyone and everything was unrelentingly red. The dialogue was, at the same time, unrelentingly vaginal. The performance was over two hours long.
As an evening of activism it certainly worked. Like at a stag night, the women cheered, jeered and obviously felt incredibly affirmed. I had a thought, though, that it is in many ways sad that the gender war has come to this. It is sad that so many women have been made to feel so bad about what’s between their legs that such a night of well-meaning mediocrity can do them the world of good.