“I bet you’re worried. We were worried. We were worried about vaginas.”
The opening lines of The Vagina Monologues still get my blood pumping. After performing the monologue “My Angry Vagina” in my college’s version of the VMs back in my feminist activist heyday, I’ve tried to catch a performance annually. While few moments can compare to the heart-pounding, palm-sweating, gender-celebrating exhilaration of sitting on a stool under a spotlight reciting lines like, “I mean what’s the deal — an army of people out there thinking up ways to torture my poor-ass, gentle loving vagina. Spending their days constructing psycho products, and nasty ideas to undermine my pussy. Vagina Motherfuckers,” this year’s performance of The Vagina Monologues at UIUC completely rocked my VM world.
I arrived at Gregory Hall 90 minutes early on Friday to catch some of the pre-show excitement I have missed so dearly since my monologuing took a back seat to trying to earn a living wage. Young women of every race, size and shape flitted between the theater and th
e dressing room, decorated in black attire with accents of pink, fuchsia, and red. The opening night energy in the almost-empty building was already so intense, and the women’s eyes were lit with such enthusiastic anticipation, I had to stop myself from shouting, “Enjoy these moments, you’ll miss them so much!”
Campus and local organizations added to the energetic buzz as they set up tables outside the auditorium; there were women from the University’s chapter of National Organization for Women (NOW) chatting up guests, teen educators from Planned Parenthood’s Teen Awareness Group (TAG) handing out an impressive variety of prophylactics, student senate candidate Max Ellithorpe advocating for condoms in the dorms, and men from UIUC’s Men Against Sexual Violence selling “I love my clit” and “I love your clit” t-shirts as well as white and milk chocolate vulva-shaped candies. (Sidenote on the candies: not only were these chocolates super fun to look at, they were even more fun to eat-especially as people tried not to watch with combined horror, intrigue and erotic delight. At $1 a pop, I purchased several to hand out to friends and strangers alike). The monologues themselves could have been a total bust, and the crowd would have left happy- just witnessing the awe-inspiring interaction of the actors, students, organizers and community members before the show was enough to garner rave reviews. Apparently, people get really reallllly jazzed when vaginas and vagina-respecting folks are gathered in one place!
The University’s production of The Vagina Monologues is part of an international campaign called V-Day. According to V-Day’s website: V-Day is a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. V-Day is a catalyst that promotes creative events to increase awareness, raise money and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations. V-Day generates broader attention for the fight to stop violence against women and girls, including rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation (FGM) and sexual slavery. The UIUC production is just one of thousands of performances taking place around the world between Feb 1 and April 30-V-Day’s “season.” This year 10% of local ticket sales and monetary donations benefitted women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of Eve Ensler’s (the creator of the VMs and founder of V-Day) current human rights campaigns, and 90% went to Champaign-Urbana’s A Woman’s Fund. In the last decade, V-Day has raised over 70 million dollars to benefit local, national, and global initiatives.
Once all the guests made their chatty ways into the auditorium, pockets stuffed with condoms, and mouths wrapped around sugar-based vulvas, the lights dimmed and the crowd fell completely silent. From the first lines to the final bows, the audience’s captivation took me aback. Throughout the performance I glanced around the almost-packed house to see people from every walk of life sincerely enjoying the show- rarely have I experienced such a diverse audience in this town, let alone a severely attentive one, and here we were, captivated by women talking about vaginas. The only two qualms I had during the entire night were: 1). The pre-show soundtrack that blared into the theater included songs like “Promiscuous Girl” by Nelly Furtado, whose lyrics seemed antithetical to the vibe of the evening; 2). The several instances of inappropriate laughter during a few not-so-funny monologues. “The Flood,” for example, discusses the trauma a young woman experiences after a teenage vulvar emission causes her to shroud her sexuality in shame, secrecy, and flat-out avoidance for the rest of her life. She completely rejects her lady parts and considers her own body bad and disgusting. Sure, many of the monologues are ab-bustingly hilarious, but this one was sad-and the audience kept giggling. Perhaps some of the monologue-goers didn’t understand the context of this scene, or maybe they felt uncomfortable, or maybe they’ve been lucky enough to grow up in a family that doesn’t teach women their bodies are disgusting. Either way, a few other dramatic scenes endured some inappropriate chuckles from the audience, but that was thankfully the worst of it.
The rest of the show was spot-on amazing. The dozens of actors in the all-female cast performed each monologue with such heart, grace, passion and conviction. Despite a few audio issues early on, every scene, while strikingly different in context and tone from the one before, flowed seamlessly into the next. At times I even forgot I was sitting in the middle of campus at a student-run production—the talent was that good. Of the 16 stellar monologues, a couple performances particularly stood out. Katie Cates’ rendition of “The Vagina Workshop” was so pure and wildly hilarious, I feared the woman in front of me was about to keel over from a laughter-induced broken rib. Abisola Ariwoola’s “My Angry Vagina” put my past performances to shame as she paced back and forth on stage, brilliantly delivering the rant and faux orgasms to the audience’s uproarious delight. In a more serious series of monologues, Kaitlynn Kelly and Kelsey Antle performed “My Vagina Was My Village” with such calmness and disquieting sincerity
, I doubt there was a dry eye or still heart in the house. Danielle Mitchell’s sexy ensemble and sultry strut drew all eyes front and center as she executed “The Woman Who Liked to Make Vaginas Happy” with a powerful no-man-necessary-for-this-orgasm womanliness. Adding some of the most memorable moments of the night to this monologue, Arnold and Kelly demonstrated a variety of moans representing different women’s orgasmic experiences. Imagine two women flailing about on the floor, releasing guttural sounds of extreme ecstasy in front of a few hundred people. Yeah, that totally happened. And it was awesome.
As the monologues concluded, the V-Day crew brilliantly gathered up the audience’s collective aura of empowerment and vagina-loving enthusiasm and pushed us one step further with a sample of Eve Ensler’s film Turning Pain to Power. The documentary highlighted the atrocities and first-hand accounts of rape-as-warfare tactics that are taking the pride and lives of countless women and girls in the Democratic of Congo. If the 90 minutes of monologues ramped up your commitment to celebrating vaginas all year long, the combination of painful and inspirational stories told by the Congolese women in the documentary made you want to quit your job and catch the next flight to Brazzaville to get involved in this cause immediately. Like many other guests around me, I walked out of the Vagina Monologues with abs sore from laughter, eyes swollen from crying, and another $10 in my hand to donate to the cause. While the performances celebrated feminism, femininity, perseverance, and humor, the camaraderie and calls to action that inspired those who attended won’t soon be forgotten.
A heart-filled THANK YOU to the women and men who made this year’s VMs so memorable-this is by far THE best production I have ever seen and it was an experience I’ll never forget. If you missed the monologues but still want to share some funds with the local and international organizations that V-Day is supporting, email vagina.director.uiuc@gmail.com or donate directly to A Woman’s Fund or the V-Day campaign.