Middlebury Women Articulate From Down Under

Author: Suzanne Mozes

Giving voices to the vaginas of women across the world on Valentine's Day, 19 Middlebury College female students let their vaginas speak at Eve Ensler's '75 "The Vagina Monologues."
The two performances in McCullough marked the fifth anniversary of the show at the College, infusing V-Day with a dual meaning.
Just as the word "vagina" stuns the reader of this article, the word bewilders the audience at first.
A staunch discomfort and apprehension surrounds this word in the public and private domain.
But by the conclusion of the performance, "vagina" is said 136 times.
Ensler desensitizes the audience with repetition while reclaiming the word with pride and reassurance.
The night opened with performances by the Mischords, Ryan Dunn-Komeh '05 and Anais Mitchell '04, who dedicated her song to her grandmother sitting in the audience. She prefaced it with, "If it weren't for her vagina, where would I be?"
The performance delved into sexual discovery, gender issues, heart-wrenching pain and comic issues of the female genitalia while circumventing expected "male bashing."
The evening focused on celebrating women, their bodies and their minds.
Directors Joya Scott '04 and Kate Pines-Schwartz '03 cast the 14 monologues with aptitude that mirrored the diversity of roles and the 300 interviews upon which "The Vagina Monologues" are based.
While all the performers, clad in outfits that made them feel sexy, left the audience somewhat awe-struck, several of the one-acts left a particularly striking impression due both to the quality of their performance and the material being discussed.
In "The Flood," Liz Myers '03 assumed the role of a 72-year-old woman from Long Island with a fastidious accent, focusing her performance on embarrassing encounters with the opposite sex at an early age.
Striking a balance between attitude, ethnicity, comedy and respect, Lollie Perez '03 brought out the true texture of "My Angry Vagina" when she yelled, "I don't want my pussy to taste like rain."
Parker Diggory '04.5 then launched into 16 moans with dramatic urgency and careful deliberation in "Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy," and Charzetta Nixon '06 developed from a child into a young woman with delicate sensibility in "The Little Coochi Snorcher That Could."
During "Under the Burqa", Scott and Pines-Schwartz made a directorial decision to send two other performers in a procession through the audience toward Lily Balsen '06, who was onstage. Balsen walked in a similar solemn processional downstage.
The two performers then walked onstage, and lifted their black cloth in front of Balsen, then finished with her performance.
When the cloth was dropped, Balsen had magically vanished, leaving the stage void of sound.
While the image mirrored the concept of "Under the Burqa," the black cloth and extra women onstage distracted from Balsen's solid performance in this serious, moving piece about an Afghani woman.
Furthermore, the processional added implications of an unrelated religious ceremony and made the audience question if women were the cause for their own oppression.
Yet, the visual image should be applauded for complementing the idea of "being cut off" and for its experimental liberty.
These monologues, along with "My Vagina Was My Village" and "The Little Coochi Snorcher That Could" left legs tightly crossed and clenched.
Scott felt that the monologues were particularly difficult because they are so powerful.
"We were walking a fine line between accuracy while maintaining the audience's distance to prevent them from feeling threatened. We tried to strike a balance between solidarity and women in such situations and such issues to allow the audience to understand the context ... [and] to identify with these women."
Ensler's script, catalyzing the creation of V-Day in 1998, began as a way to stop violence against women, a problem she encountered with alarming frequency during her interviews across the world.
As Caitlin Vaughn '04 explained, "Violence against one woman anywhere is violence against women everywhere."
As a result, ticket and merchandise sales for this year's two performances raised approximately $2,500 for Womensafe, a center for women and their needs, in the Middlebury area.
Moreover, Scott and Pines-Schwartz declared the Middlebury College campus "a rape free zone."
This directorial decision was inspired by in a celebrity filled performance at Madison Square Garden in 2001 organized and directed by Ensler.
Ensler, a Middlebury graduate, explained in an introduction to her one-woman show that she did not "have girlhood fantasies about becoming the 'vagina lady.'"
In fact, while at the College, Ensler studied Sylvia Plath's poetry in the midst of a serious bout with depression and alcoholism.Only after her graduation did Ensler sober up and begin her work as a feminist playwright.
The V-Day movement, spurred by Ensler, now moves with its own inertia. Over 2,000 V-Day events took place on Valentine's Day this year on over 1,000 locations across the world.
"The Vagina Monologues" give women a new means of communication through a second set of lips.
While flushing false feelings of security can be alarming, raising awareness of violence against women can only help, just as this past performance has helped the College's small campus.