Best. Play. Ever.
By Cate Lunt | Tuesday, March 4, 2008
So, like, every February the Eve Ensler Vigilante Justice Roadshow, as I like to call it, careers into town, scattering beer-swilling chauvinists and patriarchy-minded nitwits like dead leaves. Well, whatever’s bad for the Patriarchy™’s good for me, I like to say, thus I sort of repeatedly pump my mind’s fist whenever I become aware that they’re putting on The Vagina Monologues. After all, patriarchy, imperialism, sexism, homophobia, and other normative tendencies of mind are still blights on this land and must be stamped out by this ritual for the consecration of the stage (“play” seems a little too beige a word for the awesome force we’re dealing with). But, truth be told, I’ve never actually seen the darn thing. I mean, I’ve heard how it’s liberating and basically does to frat-boys what a bucket of water did to the Wicked Witch of the West. Their screams of agony are delightful, I’m sure, but I’d just never actually heard them. I’d like to say this happened solely because I was neck-deep in activism—rallying, chanting, letter-writing, sarcasm-wielding, changing the world, you know, all that good stuff—but to tell you the truth I just plumb forgot. Yes, I remain embarrassed.
My freshman year, I hardly knew what V-Day was, still referring to it as St. Valentine’s Day, as if this were some sort of theocracy. (Very frightening how unwittingly we implicate ourselves in right-wing oppression.) In the so-called “normal” course of so-called “Saint” Valentine’s “Day,” the “boy” and the “girl” exchange “gifts” supposedly because they are “in love” with “each other” (deconstruction has a lot of interesting things to say about whether it even makes sense to say such things as “each other” or “boy”). The “gift” or “dinner,” “massage” or “Scrabble game” is usually understood in bourgeois America to precede some sort of “intimacy” (to use the middle class’s very cowardly way of describing it) between the victim and her oppressor. This may occur in a so-called “bubble bath” surrounded by “scented” candles (which smell very normative, in my experience, conforming pathetically to what a supposedly “good” smell is supposed to “smell” like). This mating ritual is all very normative, to say the obvious, belonging as it does alongside such outdated doo-dads as the iron maiden. And while the middle class continues to refer to sex workers as “prostitutes,” they also seem very eager to trade their material possessions for not a little bang-bang.
But I don’t mean to dwell on the stupidity of middle-class America, horrible as it is. Because there is light at the end of the vagina-shaped tunnel, in the form of a dramatic piece of literature called The Vagina Monologues. As the title of this article implies, it is the best play ever.
In the past, this newspaper has sent some snarky little neocon (in khakis, hiked up to his navel, as I picture him) to dismiss out of hand this marvelous and moving work of art. This year, I basically blew into the office, caught Desai by the scruff of the neck and said, “If you run the same goddamn sacrilegious piece of right-wing hackery again, then you’re gonna get it, understand?”—and I’m not sure if he understood, since he looked all confused or maybe resigned to his fate, but I think the fact that I pressed his face into the desk for about twenty minutes contributed to his eventually relenting. A triumphant moment, and close to the quintessence of Grrl Power.
O.K., so, flash forward to the big night. Frankly, I’m a little nervous. My expectations are skyscraper-high. What if this turns out to be bad? What if it makes conciliatory gestures to the reactionary elements of society? What was happening on stage did little to bring my jitters to a reasonable amplitude. There, strolling onto the stage like he was walking onto a yacht (to borrow the immortal Carol Channing line) was, to put it bluntly, a dude. Yes, in this Walpurgis Night for Feminism and Justice, was a man, benefiting from all the advantages our society affords men. And his expression, plus the apparent nonchalance I read in his gait, seemed not even to acknowledge how privileged he was. I realized soon enough that he was simply performing the mic check, though there is nothing “simple” about anything in our postmodern age. Why couldn’t have a woman have performed this very important task? Were they trying to say, echoing that fascist Larry Summers, that women lacked the technical expertise to say “testing” into a live microphone? Maybe the thinking was that a woman would start menstruating or get pregnant and therefore not be able to execute the office of microphone checker. In other words, I was discouraged.
Other aspects offered hope, however. The décor was so classy my head almost exploded. The message seemed to be: you think we’re a load of frumps and scolds putting on what amounts to a vaudeville show of resentment, but could such a gang have thought to decorate the stage with outsize pink bows, potted flowers, shiny pillows, and stunning purple-sequin cloaks draped over everything? That is to say, they nailed it.
Continuing my roller-coaster ride, I plunged into the depths of despair when an a capella group opened the show. I don’t have anything against a capella groups per se except for the fact that they are extremely annoying. May they thrive, but not to close to me, to paraphrase what I believe is a Palestinian saying. But what these singers chose to inflict on the audience is indefensible. It was “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” one of the most normative songs in the Aretha Franklin repertoire. The crucial question when contemplating this song is “Who makes her feel ‘like’ a natural woman?” The song has some very sinister undertones. It implies that a woman requires someone (possibly a man?) to make her realize not that she already is a natural woman whether anyone acknowledges it or not but that she is “like” a natural woman, in other words, a simulacrum of authenticity. The speaker in the song repeats like a Stepford Wife the patriarchic discourses we are more used to hearing on right-wing talk radio than on the campus of a university committed to progressive values. By the end of this fascist ditty, I was trembling with rage.
But the next song, “Gratitude,” very nearly redeemed these songbirds’ performance. It’s a very sarcastic little tune about a woman who deals with unwanted advances made on her. She says she is grateful—though, in fact, she isn’t. The melody’s quiet strains pounce like the deadly mongoose, hither and thither. Much better!
But this was only a peek at the greatness to come. Ensler, though not in attendance, presided like a spirit over the evening, and her letter to the audience set the tone. “New Orleans is the vagina of America,” she said bravely—though get the so-called leaders of New Orleans to own up to this obvious fact! Meanwhile, a certain dean at Parkhurst was given the title of “vagina warrior.”
When the actual acts began, I felt not engaged but stunned, as if I’d been hit in the face by a pie made out of pure activism. Could I be dreaming? Why couldn’t people talk like this all the time? Out came some performers who took to the microphones. “Women secretly love to talk about their vaginas,” they said. Then, rather subversively, they rattled off a few dozen synonyms for vaginas. I hoped to goodness there were some frat-boy Republicans in the audience. They’re so used to talking about their penises on stage into a microphone that to see some time allotted to the other organ must have really hurt them. Finally, said the performers, as if summing up their beautiful points, “We’re worried about vaginas.” Since worrying and vaginas are two abiding concerns of mine, I was thrilled and on my feet clapping.
Next came an actual story from an actual woman. The topic was pubic hair. Her husband wanted her to shave it. She didn’t. Then the cad had an affair. The monologue is a masterpiece, putting the “Seven Ages of Man” speech from As You Like It to shame.
After this was a sketch in which—get this—vaginas were actually talking! Just gabbing and mouthing off sassily as if they were separate and sentient beings. I think when people talk about the art’s redemptive power to give voice to the voiceless, they usually have in mind something like the talking vaginas sketch from The Vagina Monologues. Conversing with more wit than those toffs in The Importance of Being Earnest, these talking vaginas brought down the house and touched my heart.
In the next little vignette, an old lady learns how to masturbate. A spinster, she has no companion in life, but more importantly she has never achieved orgasm. So often, in drama, a more or less minor aspect of someone’s life is given a disproportionate level of attention, dressed up in self-importance to an embarrassing degree because the playwright wants to convey a message. I am thrilled to say that nothing of the sort happened during this soliloquy. Masturbation was treated as the profound and culturally significant hobby we all know it to be. Actually, we could have done with a little more reverence. On occasion, the audience burst into a flippant laughter when certain techniques were discussed—no doubt they were under the influence of the normative fumes wafting in from outside the theater. Forgiveness, I reminded myself, is one trait of a good activist, if only because it helps you suffer fools. My irritation was mildly dispelled by the next act’s brilliant succession of vagina metaphors, all of which evidenced first-rate poetic imagination.
“And now for something completely different,” they could have said in between acts, though, of course, we knew that vaginas would be involved. Who could have guessed that we’d zoom from the ins and outs of onanism to what seemed to be a story about participating in a vagina workshop. Embarrassingly, I had no idea that such a diversion existed, despite being the proud owner of Vagina: A User’s Manual. This unfailingly charming routine described women looking at their genitalia with mirrors and delivering reports to the group. This self-regard resulted in unmitigated wonder. “My vagina amazed me,” said the narrator, before comparing the experience to that of astronomers discovering celestial bodies with their telescopes.
“Wow,” said a moron a row ahead of me, “Not only is that metaphor blatantly ripped off from John Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,’ but it completely degrades the profound experience of understanding an epic poem to, well, looking at your vagina with a mirror.” I bopped this fool on the head with my program, for which I received several commending first-bumps from my sisters-in-arms. The yapper sunk normatively into his chair, ashamed.
The seminar also required participants to locate their own clitorises. This proved a tall order for the narrator, who in frustration burst into tears. With some help from the seminar leader, she had an out-of-body experience and slid into her own vagina, as she described it. “My vagina. My vagina. Me,” is how this beautiful tone poem of a monologue ended.
The next bit began a little ominously, and to be honest, I questioned whether I was in able hands. It was described as “about a woman who had a good experience with a man.” I laughed a bitter, bitter laugh at this, wondering how they would make this plausible to the audience—special effects? In common experience, this simply does not happen. Well, hell, I thought, even geniuses screw up—even Shakespeare wrote “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” But this?
The narrator described a man she met named Bob who, she said, was not very appealing to her in any way. Quite right, I thought. But then she discovered one evening that he was a “connoisseur” of vagina, gazing at her naked crotch like an art critic making dewy eyes at a Caravaggio. Finding this appealing and self-empowering, she stuck it out with this bum a little while longer. I grudgingly accepted the need to suspend my disbelief in order to soak in the glory of it all.
I was taken aback by something in the next sketch, which seemed tacked on and related to this neocolonialist age in which we live. It discussed female genital mutilation, something that the mainstream, corporate-owned press in America has discussed many times. I almost flipped out, though, when the practice was described as something that happened “mostly in Africa.” What presumption! What racism, to get to the point. The idea that this happens “in Africa” is to associate all of Africa with this. No mention, of course, is made of colonialism and its legacy. Anyway, this also implies that no abuse whatsoever goes on in the west, which is completely preposterous. I felt sure, somehow, that Rupert Murdoch was behind this addition. The same went for an item about rape in Yugoslavia, which fit like a glove over the neocon agenda and our supposed “intervention” in the Balkans, which was the real rape, when you think about it. Only the next bit, about a transsexual, contained the tsunami of truth I had hoped would wash over me, that sex is arbitrarily assigned. “Arbitrary compared to what?” said the fool in front of me, whom I struck on the skull with the base of my palm.
The award for sassiest routine must go to the one that began, “My vagina is furious.” In another artist’s hands, the repetition of the anthropomorphized vagina trope might seem the proverbial one trick of a pony. But not here. In this polemical bit, though, the narrator rails against tampons, douches, or other efforts to keep the feminine parts “hygienic,” whatever that means. It’s a conspiracy to alter them. Do we demand that men wash themselves down there? No, and to my knowledge they don’t. “My vagina does not need to be cleaned up,” she proclaimed. “Why the rubber gloves?” she asks of doctors. Yeah, what are you trying to say, doctors? Metal medical tools, furthermore, should be warmed up. Finally, thong underwear is denounced. I was amazed that this play has been running for twelve years without the medical establishment and thong-making industry getting with the program.
The most stirring segment of the evening was the one that glorified and, as it proposed to do, took back the word “cunt” from those who would use it pejoratively. No one can watch this part and say that Ensler cannot hold her own against Dante, Shakespeare, Proust. Where these moldering pale-faces explore the intricacies of the human mind (bo-ring), Ensler keeps it real, she cuts through the fog, she wags her finger as she subverts the social structures that keep us from expressing ourselves. The narrator chanted that lovely word over and over, shrieking like a revivalist preacher on cocaine, and, yes, I loved it. Who says the arts aren’t politically effective?
A lawyer-turned-sex worker starred in the next bit, in which she highlighted a salient social problem facing ladies of her trade who cater to an all-female clientele. You see, she prided herself on making her clients noisy, using a variety of implements, such as whips, cuffs, and dildos. Yet the other residents of her building had the gall to stare at her because she had apparently been “disturbing” them with the noise. “Disturbing what precisely?” we might well ask, “Consumerism? Conformity? Could they not hear the Fox News Channel for all the din?” This is astounding. Of course, no mainstream newspapers will report on the callous-neighbors-of-sex-workers problem.
Then, in a routine that had me and many others in stitches, she chronicled the various orgasms she had heard, having classified them with the scrupulous attention we usually reserve for jelly bean flavors. I honestly wished this had gone on forever, so subtle was its comedy and use of language.
The entire play ended, too, to my terrible disappointment. Yet happiness coursed through my body as I shuffled out of the theater, certain as I was that I had just watched the best play ever written. Then, the talkative dunce who’d been so annoying with his philistine interjections began to give this typical rant to his companion:
Look, in fairness, there is perhaps a good idea lurking here, maybe an updated version of the Kinsey report, though hopefully it would be more careful and scientific than that. But as a drama it’s a total failure. None of the characters sustains our interest except as political symbols. Like reified grudges, they ramble onstage, telling stories that, far from being “real” and “gritty,” are about as carefully managed and contrived as can be. The only possible way people fool themselves into thinking they enjoy this is that they find it politically virtuous. If there were such a thing as “The Penis Soliloquies,” in which men sang the metaphysical significance of their genitals, it would be laughed off the stage as very obviously worthless and egotistical, and rightly so. The focus on sex as the be-all and end-all of human worth is also inexplicable except from the standpoint of ideology. And, anyway, why does this thing need to appear every year? Can no one else write feminist play, even one as bludgeon-like as this one?
That was the last straw. I have never wanted to physically harm someone before, but this twerp was asking for it. With the help of my friend, a female rugger, we howled like berserkers and pushed him into a snowbank, where, recumbent and bewildered, he received a mighty kick in his sensitive area from yours truly. Not wishing to gloat, we ambled off, while our little theater critic howled in pain. As for the play, what can I say except to echo Jonson: it is not of an age, but for all time. n
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