Powerful and Gutsy: The Vagina Monologues | Metaglossia: The Translation World | Scoop.it
From cornellsun.com - March 10, 2015 10:29 PM
Cornell’s 2015 rendition of The Vagina Monologues took place in Bailey Hall last Saturday night, presented by a cast of about 50 women. The Vagina Monologues is a play authored by Eve Ensler, and it first premiered in New York City in 1996. Over the past 20 years, Ensler’s masterpiece has been performed in 48 languages in over 140 countries; it relays the ubiquitous message that vaginas are great, that women should be proud of their vaginas and that no one has any right to maim, tease or disrespect the vagina or its holder.

This year’s rendition promoted that message powerfully. It was an updated version of the play, and it included a few details that were not incorporated into the original. Prior to attending the show, I had discussed the play with a few of my peers. I had never seen it before, and was excited by the prospect of hearing an hour-long riff on women, their vaginas and sexuality. However, a few of my friends told me not to get my hopes up. They had seen it before, they said, and they criticized it for being antiquated and Eurocentric.

However, director Aleksej Aarsaether ’17 was able to morph the play into something contemporary through his selection of the scenes included in the performance. The first altered act was one that included five pairs of projected lips. A screen dropped down from the ceiling, the stage went dark and the colorful lips were the only objects of focus. The mouths took turns moving as they recited the words emanating from monologuers’ mouths while they stood out of view. This scene provided the owners of the mouths complete ambiguity; focus was diverted from the appearance of the performers back onto the words themselves. The mouths of this act spoke the story of a transgender individual who was born as a male, but ultimately chose to identify as a female. The use of figureless voices was especially adept for this topic, as it removed any association of image with gender. In this act, gender was a state of mind. The viewers were not able to judge the readers based on their appearances as men, as women or as anywhere in between, relaying the idea that a person’s feelings, rather than their biological sex, decide how they should identify with a gender.

Another adapted scene included women who spoke languages other than English. The act, “My Vagina Was My Village,” is an act that was included in the play’s original manuscript. However, Aarsaether altered it, having different actresses repeat the lines in various languages. The actresses lined up in a row, and they each recited monologues in different languages ranging from Portuguese to Arabic, as subtitles were projected onto a screen above their heads. The inclusion of this scene nullifies any qualms that previous critics may have had about the Eurocentricity of the play; it demonstrated that misogyny is a problem that affects not only the United States, but also citizens of the global community. The most touching of these monologues came toward the end of the scene, when some of the lines were relayed in American Sign Language. As the actresses signed the words, “the soldiers put a long thick rifle inside me,” a woman toward the right of the stage motioned this action and gasped. The signing of this line brought the words to life in a corporeal representation of the adversity that women face.

While the monologue featured serious topics, the director chose to alternate uplifting scenes with somber ones in order to keep the audience cheerful. My favorite act of the play, titled “The Woman Who Loves to Make Vaginas Happy,” was a monologue highlighting the importance and variance of moaning during sex. Towards the end of the scene, a girl (blindfolded and dressed in a sexy outfit), was pulled onto the stage via a string connected to the office chair on which she was seated. Although this girl appeared helpless and docile during her introduction, her character quickly morphed into a moaning extraordinaire, as she quickly belted out over 20 different sex sounds. Each had a theme, and each was distinctly different from the last (impressive, I know).

As I left the play feeling empowered and satisfied, I happened to run into the moaner and applauded her performance. I cracked a joke saying, “I wonder what your father would think of that.” Her response: “He was sitting in the front row.” Damn, that takes guts.
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