Eve Ensler is a Tony Award-winning playwright, performer, author, and social activist. Twenty years ago her name became known around the world thanks to “The Vagina Monologues.” The play, which has been translated into over 48 languages and performed in over 140 countries, forever changed the conversation about women’s bodies. Ensler is also the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls.
Her latest production is the one-woman show “In the Body of the World.” Based on her memoir, the play dissects Ensler’s life-threatening cancer diagnosis, which she received while working with women in war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo.
We spoke to Ensler about the play, the significance of bringing it to the stage now, in 2018, and whether things have changed for women in theater since the debut of “The Vagina Monologues.”
“In the Body of the World” is playing at Manhattan Theatre Club through March 25. For tickets and more information, visit the venue website.
W&H: What was it like when Diane Paulus came to you with the idea of adapting “In the Body of the World: A Memoir of Cancer and Connection” into a play?
EE: I had thought about it before, maybe deep inside my withered past, in my consciousness, once or twice. It was someplace inside me, and I knew what it would mean. I was fine if the book had just been the book, but when Diane brought [the idea of adapting it for the stage] up, I could see it. There was part of me that said, “Well, I really do care about getting certain messages, ideals, thoughts out, and I know that theater is an amazing way to do that.”
We embarked on that process together, but it’s really only now that I realize how intense it was to make that decision.
W&H: What was your collaboration with Diane and A.R.T. [American Repertory Theater] like?
EE: It was amazing to work with Diane [A.R.T. artistic director], Ryan McKittrick [A.R.T. dramaturg], and Diane Borger [A.R.T. executive producer]. Their team is incredible. They’re just so smart and the way they approach things is so organic, not aggressive, and just so natural. For me, it was a beautiful process. It was step by step, thinking it through. It wasn’t about egos or anything like that. It was just about the best way to tell this story.
W&H: Did you have a say in the show’s artistic choices?
EE: Diane is so incredibly creative and imaginative. She watched and listened and viewed and saw and then made decisions based on what we needed to do. It was her idea that the idea for the set be taken directly from my apartment, and the amazing thing at the end [on the set] was her idea. I got to do what I wanted to do — which was perform, rewrite, get the words right, and get my performance right. I had a lot of input on my costume. When I first started removing my blouse [in a pivotal scene set in the doctor’s office during cancer treatment], I thought, “Wow, this is wild.” And now I just think, “They’re my breasts. What’s the big deal?”
I’ve always felt this crazy madness around nudity and I’ve never gotten it, to be honest. But particularly at my age, I feel so happy to just be saying, “This is my body.” I think the scene tips people off early on in the play that we’re going to be taking things off, that there’s going to be an unmasking. We’re going in! There’s something about the rawness of that moment in a doctor’s office where you know you’re really sick and you have to put that horrible medical thing on. It’s so ugly, it feels so creepy, and there’s just something about your vulnerability in that.
W&H: Was the process of writing and bringing this play to NYC audiences cathartic?
EE: No, I don’t know if the word is cathartic or alchemic. It’s intense in a way I haven’t been able to fully articulate. It’s even more personal than “The Vagina Monologues.”
W&H: What has the response to the show been like?
EE: Sometimes I feel a congealing energy and an intensity of people’s responses. I can feel so deeply how the audience is responding to it. I can feel people’s wounds. I can feel if people are sick or have been sick. I can feel where people have been caught or are getting uncaught. Sometimes I can look out and see people sobbing when the lights are up.
One night I was performing for an older group, and during the mother’s section, I could feel their angst having been mothered and their angst having been daughtered. It was this generational thing. Men also tell me they have come back three times because it’s like a healing process for them. A stage four cancer survivor came up to me and she said she was about to give up, but [after seeing the show] she changed her mind.
W&H: What does it feel like to reenact your cancer treatment?
EE: It feels intense. Some nights I’m okay. Some nights I get pulled down the rabbit hole. You can’t do this play except to do it 100 percent. It’s so physical and a lot of times it’s happening in my body, and my body takes me where it goes.
W&H: Being in a one-woman show, how do you remember all the words and what are some of the challenges in bringing these experiences to the stage?
EE: Remembering the words is the easy part. The psyche, mental, and emotional part is what’s hard. I’m usually up until 2:30 in the morning after the show.
But I also feel so grateful to be doing the show at this particular point in time. I think people really need to feel, connect, and talk about what’s really happening.
W&H: Speaking of this particular point in time, do you feel the significance of bringing the show to the stage now, in 2018, in light of #MeToo, #TimesUp, and now #NeverAgain?
EE: I’ve been singing this song for 20 years, right? I think the struggle takes much longer than we think. We’ve been struggling to end violence against women for the past 50 years, beginning with black women in the civil rights movement, women fighting for their rights, like Rosa Parks. We’ve had movements before V-Day, and we’ve had all kinds of movements during V-Day.
Then we get to now, and I’d say the struggle has been working. I’ve looked at colleges over the past year where we have had V-Days and I’ve seen all this movement, with people standing up. You have so much energy coming from this direction. But then you have this predator-in-chief who’s the president, who surrounds himself with racists, sexual predators of every kind. This is a man who prides himself on grabbing pussies. He got elected and I think that in some place in the psyche of women, it was one thing too much. All these years of building, building, building and you have that bingo moment.
But I want to remind everyone that as great as everything is that’s happening, he’s still president and he’s still surrounded, and that every day one predator falls. We haven’t won this one yet.
W&H: You developed a special connection with victims of rape and torture in the Democratic Republic of the Congo when you were invited there in 2007. How much has that work meant to you?
EE: The work I’ve done with the V-Day movement for 20 years is essentially visiting some of the most horrible places in terms of war, conflict, and rape crisis and camps in the world. It’s so interesting how violence manifests itself in different places. There’s war. Then you have the violence and the Harvey Weinsteins. Then you have the violence of the women who never truly get recognized. No matter how good women are, no matter how brilliant women are, they’re always undermined, which is another form of violence.
What’s happening in the Congo is the most gruesome kind of synergy of racism, colonialism, capitalism, and misogyny. It’s all being reenacted on the bodies of Congolese women by, in many cases, outside players. These are people who don’t even live in the Congo but rather proxy militias or multi-nationals who come in from Rwanda, Uganda, and around there. I went nine years ago, and I wrote even then that if we don’t pay attention to this there, we will see this happen everywhere.
So of course we are seeing it happen everywhere — whether it’s the Boko Haram stealing 200 girls and another 100 last week; whether it’s Sudan; whether it’s Rohingya women being raped by Myanmar’s armed forces; whether it’s the Yazidi women horribly captured and raped by ISIS. These conflicts without justice allow for these kinds of ideas to spread. It also goes back to World War II when the Japanese government took women from the Philippines and all over Asia and held them in rape camps, and they have been waiting for 70 years for justice.
We don’t have justice. If we don’t say this is wrong, the patriarchy will continue and keep doing it and keep doing it.
W&H: Is anything different in theater since you last brought “The Vagina Monologues” to the New York stage 20 years ago?
EE: That’s a very good question. I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I feel very blessed that somehow I have managed to find a way to create a career outside the establishment. There was no way that establishment was going to accept me. They weren’t feminists. They didn’t want to deal with exploration. They didn’t want to deal with facts or political issues.
I still don’t think it’s changed. I wish I could say there was a fountain of radicalness.
W&H: What about in terms of gender equality?
EE: In terms of women, yes, many more. To some degree. But are women as recognized as men? Are they as valued as men?
W&H: What are your hopes and dreams with this play?
EE: Someone wrote about our play on Instagram. It said something like “transparency as transcendence.” It made me think about what it means to tell the truth about your life and how we live in such a performative culture where we’re all performing who we’re supposed to be rather than who we really are. I think when you break that ice, everybody can tell their real story and stop acting. When we stop doing that as a culture, we can think about transformation.
I hope we make a film with this play, I really do. I don’t think I could perform it again. We’re talking about whether other people could do this role, and I think they can.
W&H: What are you working on?
EE: I have two commissions that I’m working on next with A.R.T. I also have another play opening in May at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. It’s called “The Fruit Trilogy.” It’s three short plays about women’s bodies, of course. I’m very excited about it.
