Photo by Hope Patti
The H-wing auditorium filled up in anticipation of the Women’s Center presentation of Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues” this past Friday. This Obie Award-winning play was performed by a group of actors and actresses who, dressed in all black, performed different monologues.
“The Vagina Monologues” is a play driven by feminist perspectives about not only anatomy, but also about the way women are perceived. The monologues include both humorous and heavy topics from pubic hair to rape, all with the intention of describing the feminine experience from a variety of perspectives.
“It was so interesting. I really didn’t know what to expect when my friends dragged me along to go watch the performance, but I was shockingly surprised at how much I enjoyed it. The girls did such a good job performing it that I lost track of time and I didn’t want it to end,” said student Hannah Selinovic.
One of the monologues entitled “My Angry Vagina,” performed by sophomore Grace Maute, is about the suffering that a woman’s vagina has to endure on a daily basis, including things like douching, tampons and the tools used at the gynecologist's office.
“My vagina's angry. It is. It's pissed off. My vagina's furious and it needs to talk. It needs to talk about all this shit. It needs to talk to you. I mean what's the deal? An army of people out there thinking up ways to torture my poor-ass, gentle, loving vagina. Spending their days constructing psycho products and nasty ideas to undermine my pussy,” read Maute.
The monologues include testimonials from a vast array of women of different ages and ethnicities, ranging from a 6-year-old girl to a 65-year-old woman.
A passage in “The Vagina Monologues” states, “To love women, to love our vaginas, to know them and touch them and be familiar with who we are and what we need. To satisfy ourselves, to teach our lovers to satisfy us, to be present in our vaginas, to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humor, to make them visible so they cannot be ravaged in the dark without great consequence, so that our center, our point, our motor, our dream is no longer detached, mutilated, numb, broken, invisible or ashamed.”
When the Women's Center company concluded their performance, they received a loud applause for their great stage presence and ability to share the monologues in a professional and intriguing manner.
gelliott@ramapo.edu
