About the Play:

The Vagina Monologues is a full-length comedy by Eve Ensler. An Obie Award-winning whirlwind tour of a forbidden zone, The Vagina Monologues introduces a wildly divergent gathering of female voices, including a six-year-old girl, a septuagenarian New Yorker, a vagina workshop participant, a woman who witnesses the birth of her granddaughter, a Bosnian survivor of rape, and a feminist happy to have found a man who "liked to look at it."

The Vagina Monologues is a provocative, stimulating, poignant piece depicting true stories about women's attempts to overcome society's stigmas through embracing and celebrating their sexuality.

"I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don't think about them…. So I decided to talk to women about their vaginas, to do vagina interviews, which became vagina monologues. I talked with over two hundred women. I talked to old women, young women, married women, single women, lesbians, college professors, actors, corporate professionals, sex workers, African American women, Hispanic women, Asian American women, Native American women, Caucasian women, Jewish women. At first women were reluctant to talk. They were a little shy. But once they got going, you couldn't stop them."

So begins Eve Ensler's hilarious, eye-opening tour into the last frontier, the forbidden zone at the heart of every woman. Adapted from the Obie award-winning one-woman show that's rocked audiences around the world, this groundbreaking play gives voice to a chorus of lusty, outrageous, poignant, and thoroughly human stories, transforming the question mark hovering over the female anatomy into a permanent victory sign. With laughter and compassion, Eve Ensler transports her audiences to a world we've never dared to know, guaranteeing that no one who reads The Vagina Monologues will ever look at a woman's body the same way again.

The Vagina Monologues premiered in 1996 at HERE Arts Center Off-Off-Broadway in New York and transferred to an Off-Broadway run at Westside Theatre. The play gave birth to V-Day, a global activist movement to end violence against all women and girls. V-Day activists have staged tens of thousands of benefit productions of the play in at least 48 different languages and 200 countries, raising funds for local groups including rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters.

Cast: 3 female

What people say:

"If Ms. Ensler is the messiah heralding the second wave of feminism, and a lot of people think she is, it is partly because she's a brilliant comedian … The audience … was overwhelmingly adoring." — New York Times

"The most exhilarating part is, no kidding, her extremely virtuosic way with a series of orgasmic moans … Ensler, a writer-performer with a good-natured but seriously evangelical mission about this body part, must be enjoying her success in getting the word out on such a legendarily unmentionable, mythologized and misunderstood fact of life…." — New York Newsday

"Ensler breaks taboos by talking, talking and talking some more – stripping fear and shame from what she celebrates here. It makes for quite a party. Funny, outrageous, emotionally affecting, and occasionally angry … The Vagina Monologues confront words to demystify and disarm them. In so doing, Ensler disarms the audience too." — Associated Press

About the Playwright:

Eve Ensler is an internationally bestselling author and an acclaimed playwright whose works for the stage include The Vagina Monologues, Necessary Targets, and Emotional Creature. She is the author of Insecure at Last, a political memoir. Eve Ensler is the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls. In the last decade, V-Day has raised more than $70 million for grassroots groups that work to end violence against women and girls around the world. Eve Ensler lives in Paris and New York City.