ABSTRACT
In the mid-1990s, playwright and performer Eve Ensler wrote The Vagina Monologues.1 Created from a series of interviews with women on the subject of their bodies and their experiences with violence, the Monologues achieved immediate success and won an Obie Award (1997) and a Guggenheim Fellowship Award (1999). The text’s agenda is premised on Ensler’s observation that “bad things are happening to women’s vaginas everywhere.”2 As of today, the play has been translated into 48 languages, performed in thousands of venues, and become the basis of a global movement against gender violence. Born out of Ensler’s personal experience with battering and rape and her theatrical and grassroots feminist activism,3 V-Day is a transformational project supported by drama. Every year, communities around the planet join the project, becoming, as actor Glenn Close has termed it, “part of her crusade.”4 On the creative side, V-Day has spawned other full-length plays, such as Necessary Targets (2001), The Good Body (2004), or I Am an Emotional Creature (2010). It has also produced the documentary films V-Day: Until the Violence Stops (2003) and What I Want My Words to Do to You (2004), and a book of photographs entitled Vagina Warriors (2005). Adopting Erika Fischer-Lichte’s thesis about the transformative power of
performance,5 this chapter examines Ensler’s leadership and her gender-violencecentered dramatic production. By looking at both branches of V-Day-the political and the artistic-through the lenses of theories such as Michel Foucault’s and Hélène Cixous’s, it attempts to demonstrate that theater in the twenty-first century continues to be a weapon for consciousness-raising, denunciation of abuse, and transformation of mentalities and everyday practices, such that can bring real-life benefits to women around the world.
