Vaginas celebrated

You can scream “vagina.” You can scream “vagina” by yourself, or you can scream “vagina” with 133 other people seated in the ’92 Theater on a Saturday afternoon. When “The Vagina Monologues” co-director Sarah Abbott ’10 entreats you to do it, thrusting back her body and dropping her hips to roar, reaching the height of the ’92 Theater ceiling, you will scream back at her, because that is what she wants.

Setting the tone for the 2008 production of “The Vagina Monologues” through a call-and-response vagina warm-up, Abbott, like the rest of the “Vag Mons” collective, expended enormous amounts of energy to engage the audience. Throughout the production, the cast maintained impressive levels of focus and intensity to get across their vagina facts, histories and anecdotes.

Performing fourteen monologues, the twenty-two person black-clad cast voiced their concerns about vaginas and the manner in which women are viewed and treated. The performance began with the chorus stating, “We were worried about vaginas,” and built through a series of stories and vagina trivia with the ultimate goal of creating increased awareness, and, ideally, of giving the vagina a voice, the chorus fittingly asking, “If your vagina could talk, what would it say?”

Although the monologues were routinely well-executed, Ceci Lynn-Jacobs’ ’11 monologue about reclaiming vagina pride through the attention of an otherwise average male vagina connoisseur was brilliant. In her piece, entitled, “Because He Liked to Look at It,” Lynn-Jacobs demonstrated impressive vocal range through her acting. Reliving the process by which she came to love her vagina, she carefully paused to let other parts of her body, like her nose, become conscious of the impact of her newfound vaginal respect.

Another strong performance came from Alexandra San Roman ’11 in a monologue entitled “My Angry Vagina.” She stormed the stage in the requisite cast black and a pair of hot pink pumps, speaking with excellent contrast of volume, lowering her voice before she screamed, “vagina mother fuckers!” It was one of the many vaginally related exclamations that erupted throughout the show.

Other monologues addressed issues of rape, vaginal secretion, and negotiating pubic hair as a method of self-assertion, with strong performances coming from Evelina Pierce ’10, Maya Barros-Odim ’10 and Elizabeth Malkin ’11. Highlights included Elizabeth Trammell’s ’10 portrayal of a 72-year-old woman who learns to acknowledge and appreciate her vagina and Emily Evnen’s ’10 on-stage orgasms.

Though the show was well attended for all three performances and spoke to a range of issues concerning the female body and its movement in physical, sexual and social space, Liana Woskie ’10, said the performance plays “less of a role on a campus as liberal as Wesleyan’s.”

Other students, seeing the production for the first time, noted that they were pleased to see it at the University because they felt comfortable experiencing the subject matter with the rest of the student audience.

Co-directors Sarah Abbott ’10 and Susanna Myrseth ’10 did admirable work with the cast, creating a production that was cohesive, but allowed space for each of the members in the cast, including the chorus, to build distinctive personalities. Abbott and Myrseth also seamlessly incorporated one of the aspects of this production that was unusual for “The Vagina Monologues,” the performance of a student-written piece.

Taking its cues from the other monologues in the production, Aaliya Zaveri’s ’09 monologue, beginning, “Today is our twenty-fourth wedding anniversary,” explored one woman’s experience in an arranged marriage, the distant memory of an unexpected sexual encounter and the secret violation of cultural practices. Zaveri’s monologue worked well with the other pieces because it was full of reverence for the body, and helped to contextualize the boisterous vaginal force of some of the other monologues. She delivered the piece with exquisite pacing, describing the slow samosa eating and kind eyes of her husband.

She described the aftermath of her first sexual experience, with a stranger on a train, as feeling as if there were, “a light between [her] legs.”

She, along with the rest of the cast, radiated a fierce pride for her body, bringing a fully developed sense of humanity to a collectively outstanding production.