The Vagina Monologues - All About Eve
The article was published in The Young Reporter in April 2004 and revisited in August 2020.
“...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.”
"If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?"
"A large hat full of flowers."
– The Vagina Monologues (1996), Eve Ensler
"...patriarchy is the most persistent, stubborn virus. We are still searching for political and spiritual antibodies to fight this massive infection. Then perhaps we will be able to wipe it out for good."
– Eve Ensler, in her interview by Emma Watson for ELLEUK.COM, 2017
Women divide their legs. Women express the thrill of female orgasms. Women look at their vaginas with mirrors. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not fleshing out the plot of a porno on a shoestring budget here. I’m merely describing what Hong Kong actresses simulated in American author Eve Ensler’s play, The Vagina Monologues (TVM), hailed as “the bible for a new generation of women”.
Topics covered in the play shoot in various trajectories, like a splendid firework, yet they have a common thread uniting them all: women. They range from the second sex’s shame towards their vaginas to their excitement about their erotic awakening, from their ambivalence towards their menstruation to their painful experience of being raped. And the list marches on with pride.
The local rendition of Ensler’s play, comprising monologues by women across the age, race, religion, and sexuality spectrum, made its debut in Hong Kong early this year. Local drama company Playhouse Theatre presented it on 14 February 2004, Valentine’s Day, with three shows staged in Cantonese and three shows in English. I'm sure Cupid was watching in the audience, bow and arrows ready.
“I say vagina because I want people to respond,” stated the American activist, who survived physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her father as a child. At the start of TVM, Ensler, who interviewed more than 200 women for her play, wrote, "I bet you're worried. I was worried. That's why I began this piece. I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don't think about them."
"I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas – a community, a culture of vaginas. There's so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them – like the Bermuda Triangle. Nobody ever reports back from there."
But how did the Hong Kong audience react to the “forbidden” play, with monologues titled "My Angry Vagina", "Reclaiming Cunt", and "The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy"? A new monologue is added every year to the repertoire, to bring to the surface a current issue impacting women worldwide.
Momoko, director of TVM, is positive about the local audience’s reviews of the play. “Most of them have enjoyed it and the performance has also inspired them to contemplate their vagina or their friend’s, as “something” they have never properly addressed before.”
Queenie, an actress from the play, casts doubts over the Hong Kong audience's readiness and willingness to accept TVM, let alone embrace it. “It's obvious that foreign audiences get into it much quicker. One of my friends said it was kind of hard to stomach during the opening scenes,” she said.
Shirley, another actress from the play, said that her friends felt estranged when they heard words like “hymen”, “clitoris”, and “vagina”. Like Charlotte baffled by Samantha's no-holds-barred talk in SATC. She said the play contained a lot of scenes that provoked laughter, but what concerned her most was whether the audience caught the sad message behind these jokes – of women’s indoctrinated passivity when it comes to talking about their bodies, the stories of hopes and fears, pleasures and agonies, triumphs and defeats they carry.
She felt insulted when some men took advantage of her when she was young, and this sense of shame still lingers. Through being part of the play, Shirley hopes to understand her body better, to search for and forge women’s collective identity together with her peers.
Steve Guo, a journalism professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, said, “The play is too much for Hong Kongers. It is like asking them to do undergraduate courses when they are still in primary school.” He also thinks that our society is two or three steps lagging behind what Ensler asks of women and men, due to the weight of traditional morals. People here tend not to question why conventions like female sexuality's suppression exist in the first place.
Peter Jordan, a drama lecturer from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, agrees with Guo’s observations. “In the 70s women from the west burnt bras as a symbol of their liberation (from patriarchy), but I have never seen anything like this here.” He thinks that staging TVM for a few people with bourgeois taste is not going to bring a lot of change to the city’s perceptions of female sexuality.
“But it (the play) made it here, and some audiences are still mulling over it,” said Jordan, who thinks that the play is very well written and demystifies a lot for men as well.
Across the pond, TVM is a huge success in the U.S. Public figures such as Jane Fonda, Oprah Winfrey, Viola Davis, Alanis Morissette, and Brittany Murphy performed in the play and walked the audiences through their private selves, shared with them their secret gardens. This gave birth to the grassroots movement V-Day on 14 February 1998. Founded by Ensler and her team, it aims to raise money and awareness to end violence against women and girls around the world. V-Day aspires to tackle issues from rape and battery of women, to human trafficking of female sex slaves.
V stands for Victory, Valentine, and Vagina. It is the name Ensler chose for herself after writing the book The Apology (2019) and finding closure from her past abusive relationship with her father.
In solidarity with its counterparts, TVM presented by Playhouse Theatre is part of the V-Day movement.
Proceeds from benefit productions of the play are used to "fund local programs, support safe houses, rape crisis centers, and domestic violence shelters, change laws to protect women and girls, and educate local communities to raise awareness and change social attitudes toward violence against women".
