THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES is certainly not a “gay” play; nor does its author, Eve Ensler, market it as such. It is considered primarily a “feminist” play, but ever since its première in the late 1990s, a number of lesbian and trans-identified scholars and activists have criticized Ensler and the V-Day organization—a worldwide movement inspired by the play—which upholds a set of production policies, among them a disparagement of casting male-bodied or transgender men to perform the play.
At Marlboro College in Vermont, where I taught theater last year, the production was almost canceled due to student protests. At issue was the students’ belief that the V-Day organization is implicitly transphobic due to its gender exclusion policy. Because The Vagina Monologues has become a nationally and internationally recognized “rite of passage” production for women at a great many college and university campuses worldwide, it is reasonable to ask, as some students did at Marlboro College, why the reality of trans identity is ignored in the text of the play, and why it continues to be ignored or dismissed by the V-Day movement. In October 2012, I received an e-mail from Morgan, one of the Student Life Coordinators at Marlboro, asking if I might be interested in collaborating on a production of The Vagina Monologues. Being only one of two theater arts professors in a faculty of only forty people, I wasn’t surprised that I would be contacted with ideas for performances in the theater space. Marlboro College has neither academic departments nor majors, and the interdisciplinary, student-crafted nature of the curriculum gave nearly everyone in the community carte blanche when it came to use of the theater. Morgan informed me that the Monologues had never been performed at Marlboro. (The play opened in 1996 when Eve Ensler produced and first performed the collection of monologues at the HERE Arts Center in New York City.) I found this hard to believe, given that nearly every liberal arts college on the eastern seaboard has been producing The Vagina Monologues just about annually, or so it seems, since the early 2000s. Morgan wanted to produce the show in the spring, around February, and in accordance with Eve Ensler’s V-Day guidelines. While The Vagina Monologues has become one of the most well-known plays of the last fifteen years, the V-Day organization has also made a considerable impact. On their website at www.VDay.org, the organization describes itself as “a global activist movement to end violence against women and girls” and as “a catalyst that promotes creative events to increase awareness, raise money, and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations.” Also, the V-Day movement has the intention of “generat[ing]broader attention for the fight to stop violence against women and girls, including rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation (FGM), and sex slavery.” The movement promotes community and college performances of The Vagina Monologues as well as a number of other performance pieces devised by playwright Eve Ensler. Morgan reached out to both the Women’s Resource Center on campus and the Women’s Freedom Center in nearby Brattleboro, Vermont, for support and official sponsorship of the show. The WFC is a nonprofit organization whose mission is “to work toward ending men’s physical, sexual and emotional violence against women and their children” and to offer “support and advocacy to survivors of violence, as well as prevention and educational activities to help create a community in which violence is not tolerated.” Morgan recruited two undergraduate theater students to co-direct the production. Auditions were open to the entire Marlboro community. I was the only faculty member to accept a role in the show, and five staff members from various departments on campus also took parts. Morgan asked if I wouldn’t mind working with a few members of the cast who had never performed in a play. Rehearsals involved private meetings with each of the actors, discussing the monologue, rehearsing it, receiving notes, and making a plan for character work and vocal exercises. One of my first meetings was with a student I’ll call Theresa. (All Marlboro student names have been changed for this article.) She was a sophomore interested in pursuing women’s studies who seemed excited to be involved in The Vagina Monologues. She had the thankless role of Narrator, so we went over her little introductions to each of the monologues. In the midst of our meeting, Theresa asked me, “Have you ever done this show before?” Of course, I said, as I’d both taught the play and performed parts of it in workshops and fundraisers during my undergraduate and graduate school years. “So,” she asked tentatively, “do you like the play?” I hesitated at first. As a faculty member who identifies as both a lesbian and, more controversially, a theater professor, I knew that my response might have an impact on the student’s perception of the play. While I certainly didn’t pretend to believe that my opinions or personal tastes would or should be more highly respected than anyone else’s, I knew that my role at the college was as a mentor and an educator, and I didn’t want to alienate myself from students who loved The Vagina Monologues and saw both its performance potential and its value as a work of female-empowering drama. So I replied: “I think it’s a good collection of monologues and it’s a really important piece. However, I take some issue with the restrictions on productions set by the playwright and the V-Day organization.” I then directed Theresa to the V-Day Movement website, which states the following: No male actors, but please include & encourage involvement. We suggest using the following guideline to determine who “qualifies”: People who lead their lives as women are eligible to perform in your production. This includes people who are born as women and transgendered individuals, it does not include drag queens. We leave it to your good judgment and your sensitivity to specific situations to make the casting decisions for your individual production. Since the time of the play’s development and its first production in 1998, The Vagina Monologues has raised questions and criticisms from some feminist scholars and activists, who found problems with both the play and its co-organization, the V-Day Movement. The latter project’s goals of empowering female sexuality and preventing violence against women were under close scrutiny from some self-identified feminists. “Is this the perfect feminist organizing strategy or a watered-down version of feminism that doesn’t use the ‘F-word’ (feminism)?” asked Carol Anne Douglas in a review of Ensler’s project in an old issue of the lesbian publication Off Our Backs (April 2001). Another Off Our Backs review, published a year later (May-June 2002), defined the play’s politics as “Hollywood Feminism” and posited that the play’s problems mirror problems in the feminist movement by “ignor[ing]certain groups and glamor[izing]others.” Certainly, the play was not perfect and still isn’t, even as it evolves and new monologues are added by Ensler as new issues of social justice for women around the world become more prevalent over time. However, this has not prevented multitudinous, liberal-leaning academic institutions from producing the show on a nearly annual basis. As my fellow theater professor friend once said, “At any given time, you can’t throw a rock in the Boston area without hitting a college production of The Vagina Monologues.” It continues to be promoted by college and university administrators, drama and women’s studies departments, and feminist and queer-identified student groups, without hesitation. At Marlboro College, the production became notorious before rehearsals had even begun. Word spread among the undergraduate population that the directors had dismissed male- bodied and male-identified performers from auditions before hearing them speak a word. Indeed, student director Sarah consulted with Morgan about the production requirements listed on the V-Day Movement website. As a first-year student and a first-time director, Sarah followed the organization’s guidelines to the letter. After all, this was a school-sponsored event receiving support from several student organizations and off-campus community groups. Both faculty and staff members were in the cast. Why invoke Eve Ensler’s potential wrath? Within 24 hours of the posting of the audition announcement on Marlboro College’s on-line forums and campus-wide bulletin boards, I had received an e-mail addressed to members of the Women’s Resource Center from a student member suggesting a boycott of the play along with an emergency discussion that addressed problems within the text of the play and its deleterious effects upon the school’s trans community. The next day I saw Sarah in my acting class and asked her what had happened. She insisted that no male-bodied or trans-identified students had attended the auditions and that, if they had, they would not have been turned away. However, the “word on the street” was that unnamed trans-identified, “genderqueer,” and “cisgendered” male students would not be welcomed. At first I found the situation baffling. Since neither Sarah nor Morgan had actually barred anyone from auditioning, what was there to be offended about? Was the response simply based on conjecture or, worse, rumors? Had I inadvertently turned this production into a scandal because I had directed a student to a website? The next few weeks were tense, to say the least. In my acting class, our weekly “check-ins” focused in on The Vagina Monologues, its overvaluing of cisgender heterosexual and lesbian women, and its devaluing of their transgender sisters and brothers. One of my students, Ted, a trans-identified junior, said he was offended that he could not participate in the production and planned simply not to attend the performance. Sarah informed me during my office hours that she received quite a few e-mails from fellow students asking her to discontinue rehearsals for the play. Understandably, she felt upset and angry that the production caused such a problem on campus. The Women’s Resource Center scheduled a town hall meeting (the traditional style of formal discussions at the college, based upon the institution’s model of collective engagement and responsibility for all members of the community), and the resulting debate only intensified the argument rather than resolving it. At the final dress rehearsal for the show, the student production assistant, Meagan, confronted Sarah and Morgan before the run-through and expressed her desire for the cast to talk about their feelings regarding the play’s exclusion of students at Marlboro. Morgan replied that she felt it unnecessary. In the end, the performance of the Monologues was well-attended by staff, faculty, and members of the Brattleboro and Marlboro communities. A few dozen undergraduate students attended the performance but were noticeable for their scarcity among the other demographics. Perhaps this was a form of silent protest against the production. On the other hand, it may have been a sign of a generational difference in which the “older” members of the community still saw the play as a groundbreaking work of feminist drama despite being almost fifteen years old, while undergraduates believed it to be flawed, dated, and in need of significant updates to go along with our rapidly changing times. SO, what to do with The Vagina Monologues, particularly its role as a “rite of passage” play and educational tool promoting gender equality at high schools and colleges? The play does not pretend to be all-inclusive. The title itself declares that its focus will be on the female body and female genitalia rather than on philosophical questions about the nature of gender itself. The V-Day organization has grown into a global movement that promotes performances of a number of other plays and performance pieces, theater festivals, political campaigns, and scholarships for students. Interestingly enough, a forum called V-Men has been formed where commentators can post essays and opinion pieces about violence toward women and other issues around gender inequality. Clearly, the V-Day movement has gone beyond just The Vagina Monologues, expanding its scope and purpose while reaching out to communities on a global scale. At Marlboro, students may have reacted to the Vagina Monologues on too granular a scale and responded hastily to a theoretical injustice without addressing the true circumstances. They might legitimately have spoken against the limited portrayal of lesbians in the play, as only two of the monologues feature queer-identified women—one a sex worker and the other a woman who experiences her first sexual encounter as a statutory rape. Or the students could have protested the scarcity of plays about transgender people in general. On the other hand, at a tiny school like Marlboro that promotes diversity, inclusion, and tolerance of all identities, a project that excludes members of the community because of their sexual or gender identity arguably does not match the school’s ideological framework. More than anything, my experience at Marlboro demonstrates, not a need to dismiss or eliminate such theatrical works, but the importance of creating new and diverse performance pieces that acknowledge, validate, and represent more identities and life experiences. The Vagina Monologues has its place in American theater as a statement of female empowerment and self-acceptance, but we need theater and performance that encourage a larger range of voices across the full spectrum of gender and sexual identity.
Helen Deborah Lewis, PhD, is a member of the theater faculty at the Boston Conservatory.
