Eve Ensler's Obie-award winning play, The Vagina Monologues, opened off-Broadway at the Westside Theatre in New York in 1997. Originally a one-woman show, the piece's frank humor and emotion concerning female sexuality quickly began to attract the attention of audiences and critics. In 1998, Ensler staged a celebrity production of the show to raise awareness and money for violence against women. The public attention and interest generated from this performance led to the development and expansion of V-Day into an annual, worldwide event. During the week of Valentine's Day, Ensler stages a celebrity benefit, as well as releases the rights of the play to college organizations. Over the years this project has grown, diffusing itself throughout America, and challenging people to consider the word "vagina," as well as the state women's sexuality in general.

When asked how she began the project, Ensler describes it as "kind of a gorgeous accident . . . I was having a conversation with this woman about menopause, and we stumbled on the subject of her vagina. She started saying things about her vagina that really surprised me--that she had enormous contempt for it, and it was all dried up and finished and done. She was a very forward-thinking woman and a feminist, and I thought, 'Wow! How odd. Is this what women think about their vaginas?"*

So she decided to investigate. At first she casually questioned her friends, asking them what they thought of their vaginas. "Everything that every woman said was so utterly startling and amazing that I kept going," she explains. "…Before I knew it, I was down the vagina trail, and I haven't really gotten off it."**

After 200 interviews, Ensler composed a series of diverse monologues about vaginas and worked them together to create the original script for The Vagina Monologues. With speakers ranging from an elderly Jewish woman to a Bosnian rape victim to a lesbian sex worker, the individual stories reveal the confusion, joy, shame, and power women feel for their vaginas. When asked why she thinks the show has enjoyed such an immense success, Ensler says that "when you put out something that people are privately obsessed about, it always takes off because it frees up something in people. I think women are hungry to think, talk, feel, know about their vaginas because there's no context for it. There's no role for it. And if your vagina doesn't exist in the culture, for god's sake, you don't exist in the culture. I think I tapped into a hunger for something."***

More than 4 years after the original opening of The Vagina Monologues, the show has taken off in every imaginable direction. Though Ensler is involved in new projects, including her plays Necessary Targets: A Story of Women and War and The Good Body, The Vagina Monologues is far from finished. In New York, a rotating cast of three women keeps the show going--actresses have included Brooke Shields, Carol Kane, Claire Danes, Julianna Marguiles, Calista Flockhart, and Rosie Perez. V-Day 2001 filled Madison Square Garden with a veritable vagina fest, featuring legends like Glenn Close, Oprah Winfrey, Gloria Steinem, and Jane Fonda, and raising over $2 million to combat violence against women. A touring production set out in late 2000 and will continue to travel the country into 2002. The College Campaign just completed its third successful year, growing from 65 college campuses in 1999 to over 225 in 2001. Finally, in the fall of 2001, the Youth Initiative will be launched, which will strive to empower girls by fostering high self-esteem and encouraging strong female fellowship.

So keep your ears open for news about the show, particularly around February. The vagina love is spreading.