Vagina Monologues makes a comeback

The last time "The Vagina Monologues" was shown at Seattle University was 2006. Now, after a three-year hiatus, Seattle U students have come together again to stage the production. The play ran March 6, 7 and 8 in the Pigott Auditorium and was supported by involvement from Seattle U's Society of Feminists, SEAC and the Educational Programs Fund.

"The Vagina Monologues" is an episodic play written in 1998 by Eve Ensler, the founder of the women's rights organization V-Day. The script draws from a continuing series of interviews given to Ensler by women about their bodies and sexuality. New scenes are added to the play every year, utilizing humor, sadness, violence, perhaps even hubris, to focus on the female sexual organ as both a tool of female empowerment and as a locus of trauma and abuse.

The Seattle U production was permitted by the V-Day College Initiative, a program that, according to the V-Day Web site, "invites members of college and university communities around the world to present benefit productions of select artistic works on their campuses annually…to raise awareness about violence against women and girls as well as raise money for local beneficiaries that are working to end violence."

Student motivation has provided the impetus to bring the production back to Seattle U.

The intention of the play was to provide information about kinds of violence perpetrated against women, and to contribute to an ongoing dialogue about censored or taboo subjects related to sexuality says Stephanie Malinowski, junior English and women's studies major, and president of the Society of Feminists. As such, the ushers, ticket sales people, graphic design team, tech crew, 16 cast members, four producers and three directors involved in the show were all Seattle U students.

"If one person decided to make service a more integral part of their life after attending the show," Malinowski says, "or decided to make the effort to learn more about what they as an individual could do to help end gendered violence, I will have felt successful."

The campus production of "The Vagina Monologues" was conceived in October by Malinowski along with Kenna Kettrick and Cozy Josephson. Kettrick, a senior drama, history and English student, said they all wanted to see more student-produced theater on campus, and settled on "The Vagina Monologues" because of its recent absence. Kettrick says they brought the play back in hopes it would become a yearly tradition at Seattle U.

Throughout its 11 years of existence, during which it has won The Village Voice's Obie Award as well as helped to raise more than $50 million for women's anti-violence groups, the play has garnered perhaps as much criticism as support. It has been attacked for its depiction of sex, masturbation, rape and lesbian relationships by social conservative groups.

But it has been criticized by feminist and postcolonial critics as well. Betty Dodson, for example, a New York-based feminist artist and sex educator, has taken public issue with the play's apparent anti-male bias-Dodson claims the play laments rape of women by men but depicts statutory rape of a young girl by an older woman as a pleasant experience. Similarly, postcolonial critics claimed the play creates a setting in which "the experience of 'Third World women' is deployed in a way that enables and sustains the Western woman as the norm and center of reference."

Regardless of criticism, the production seemed to be a success.

"I thought the entire project went extremely well," says Kettrick. "The sheer amount of people who turned out…was amazing, and showed how important this project still is to the community."

And in many ways, the project's coordination with the Break the Silence conference March 7 seems to indicate a continued public concern over violence, particularly toward women, in today's culture.

Also sponsored in part by the Society of Feminists, Break the Silence was an all-day event open to the public.

The events may have seemed like a coordinated outcry against some kind of recent trauma or violence in the community, but Malinowski says that was not the case.

"I just think that it's all interrelated," she says. "We need not a specific event to remember the importance [of issues of violence against women]. These are conversations we should be involved in frequently."

Kettrick echoes this sentiment.

"It's not an issue that's going away," she says. "So it is still pertinent to talk about."