Viva vaginas!

It was five years ago, the day Eve Ensler decided she’d heard enough. She’d been traveling the world performing her one-woman show, The Vagina Monologues. The performance was simply Ensler, alone onstage, reading monologues based on interviews she’d conducted with more than 200 women about their vaginas. Her subjects ranged from silly (“If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?”) to serious (the rape of women in Bosnia, the institutionalized misogyny of Afghanistan).

After every show, women waited to talk to her. “The play had somehow freed up their memories, pain and desire,” Ensler recalls. “Night after night I heard the same stories [of abuse]. Slowly, it dawned on me that nothing was more important than stopping violence against women—that the desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honor and protect life and that this failing would, if we did not correct it, be the end of us all.”

It was this realization that inspired Ensler to create V-Day—a grassroots movement to end violence against girls and women. Once a year, on or around Valentine’s Day, Ensler offers free use of The Vagina Monologues to anyone who will stage a nonprofit performance to raise money for women’s organizations in their community. In five years, the effort has raised more than $7 million. Today the play is performed in 23 languages in 45 countries, from Zaire to Antarctica. V-Day 2002 includes events at 550 colleges in the U.S. (including CSUS and UC Davis) and 800 cities worldwide. This year also marks the first time V-Day will be celebrated in Sacramento. On March 2, 13 local actresses, under the direction of Sacramento producer Dawn Spinella, will perform The Vagina Monologues following a silent art auction featuring works by local artists in the theme of “female empowerment.” All proceeds from Sacramento’s inaugural V-Day event will benefit WEAVE.

“The phenomenon of The Vagina Monologues is unique in the history of theater,” says Willa Shalit, executive national director of V-Day. “Never before has one piece of theater—literally one woman sitting on one stool on one stage in downtown New York—turned into such a huge social movement.”

Shalit attributes the popularity of V-Day to people’s growing frustration with the government. “Change doesn’t seem to be able to occur within our political systems,” she says, “and yet there is a huge desire for change in the world. One of the changes people really want is for women to no longer be abused. People are able to tap into that feeling and that activism through this piece of theater.”

How is it that talking about vaginas can end violence against women? As Ensler explains: “Part of the dynamic of abuse—whether it’s rape or battery or sexual slavery—is that women are taught to feel shame about their vaginas and not to realize that their vaginas belong to them. If you don’t feel like you own something, when someone comes to take it from you, you won’t fight to keep it. So the play, by encouraging women to celebrate and have a relationship with their vaginas, changes that whole dynamic.”

It is January 18, 2002—the second night of auditions for The Vagina Monologues in Sacramento. There

are women in all corners of the room, sitting in chairs or on the floor, hastily reading scripts and muttering to themselves. These actresses have just been assigned the specific monologue they will audition with. Spinella sits at a table against one wall, surrounded by piles of applications and headshots. An empty chair stands alone in the center of the room.

She calls the name on the first application and a young girl with tattoos and piercings stands to deliver a fierce performance of “My Vagina Was My Village,” a monologue about rape during wartime. As her words spill out, the energy in the room changes. One by one, the actresses drop their scripts and begin listening. The air of competition dissolves.

When the next woman, a professionally dressed mother with no previous acting experience, reads her piece, the women—now more audience than auditioners—laugh out loud at the humorous bits. Even Spinella, who must know the piece by memory, chuckles to herself. The women finish their performances, but ask if they can stay and listen. The night moves on and no one leaves.

This is the nature of the monologues—to be properly experienced, they must be read aloud. And when a woman reads them, it is impossible not to listen. The words are spoken and everything changes.

Or so Ensler hopes. “The Vagina Monologues have really set fire to women’s wisdom and women’s experience and women’s incredible desire to keep the species alive. I think people are really clear about this since September 11. Women know in their bodies and really sensitive men know this, too: We’re in very dangerous shape as a human species. Women know that something is wrong and they want a future. They want to see the planet go on.”

Spinella recalls her feelings when she first saw The Vagina Monologues in New York. “I was sitting in this 200-seat house, in a sea of women, with a few male heads polka-dotting the audience. Three women came out in black, in bare feet and starting reading. It was immediately entertaining and so funny. It was also appalling at times. My stomach would just knot up thinking about these people’s experiences.

Then at one point I was like, ‘Holy moly! She’s saying cunt!’ I’m not very conservative, but I was whispering, ‘I can’t believe she’s saying cunt!’ It was great, though, because the actress got into it and I realized it wasn’t such a bad word.”

Spinella left the theater enlightened and determined to bring V-Day to Wilmington, North Carolina, where she lived at the time. “We were in the Bible Belt and we had a hard time finding an organization that wanted to take our money and be associated with The Vagina Monologues, but it all went well in the end.”

When she moved here last year, Spinella was surprised to find that the Capital City was not already a V-Day participant. Sensing an opportunity to “open some minds,” she got online with V-Day headquarters and became the official Sacramento organizer. For the last several months, Spinella has been networking with artists, actresses, vocalists and activists to create Sacramento’s V-Day experience.

Thus far, she’s encountered a mixed bag of blessings and obstacles to her efforts. In contrast to her experience in Wilmington, “finding an organization that embraced the idea of V-Day was not hard. The president of the Board of Directors at WEAVE was very enthusiastic. And I’ve had a good response from the community. A lot of women seem interested.”

Luckier still is the fact that Kathleen Chalfant, the Tony-winning actress from the CBS series The Guardian, and Guiding Light‘s Victoria Platt, have volunteered to act in the Sacramento performance. Coincidentally, Kathleen Chalfant was one of the three actresses performing the night Spinella first saw The Vagina Monologues. “I was sitting in the audience thinking, ‘This woman is incredible. I can’t wait for her next monologue.’ And now she’s volunteered to come to Sacramento!”

The road to V-Day Sacramento has not been without resistance, however. Spinella has had a difficult time getting media attention from many major outlets. “We were disappointed when Channel 10 said they did not want to be involved. I was also told by Channel 3 that they didn’t have any space. Without the support of large media sources, it’s very hard to garner the attention and respect [V-Day] deserves.”

Although Spinella was prepared to be misunderstood by corporate media, she didn’t expect to meet with resistance within her cast. “I had one of the actresses quit because she found a line in the script offensive,” she says. The portion of the play in question discusses the trials of putting on a V-Day event in Oklahoma. “In context, the line is very funny. In the Bible Belt it can be very hard to get a show like this started ‘because we all know Christians don’t have vaginas.’ But the actress, as a Christian, was offended by that line. It really disappoints me that she couldn’t accept it. First, it was a joke. Everyone knows Christians have vaginas, and, secondly, because some conservative sects are so opposed to V-Day. That’s part of what we’re struggling against.”

At least one actress reported that posters for the The Vagina Monologues she’d posted had been removed anonymously, a phenomenon common to V-Day events worldwide. As Ensler reminds her organizers, "Remind everyone how important it is that the vagina posters get seen. Remind them that they are very comfortable seeing words like ‘anthrax’ and ‘smallpox’ and ‘scud missiles’ and ‘nuclear weapons.' There’s nothing about vaginas that kill people. In fact, they do just the opposite. They give birth and they give pleasure and they’re a window to the universe. … Where there is resistance to vaginas, we must move forward!"