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April 14, 2006
In the belly of a beast
Ensler's new work tackles women's body image.
MONIKA ULLMANN
Eve Ensler has been on the road with her new play, The Good
Body, since October and she's tired, yet elated.
"What I really didn't expect was a bunch of screaming, hooting
and hollering women in a place like Charlotte, S.C.," said
Ensler in a recent phone interview with the Independent. "But
it's always a surprise, and what I found is that there's a much
different America out there."
Doing an average of eight shows a week, she's criss-crossed North
America, playing to sold-out houses in 18 cities. She's no stranger
to this kind of life – she's done it before with The Vagina
Monologues, the play that changed the way women – and some
men – think and talk about this most intimate body part.
With The Good Body, she's in familiar territory. This time,
she's taken on the lethal epidemic of perfectionism that women everywhere
are quite literally buying into, with a staggering array of products
and services designed to fix the "imperfect" female body.
Apparently, she's hit a quivering nerve. She reports that in Seattle,
it was like a "rock concert." Everywhere, the play unleashed
intense emotions.
"I found that a lot of women are fed up and I met them in all
states," she said, "There really is a lot of sorrow out
there; a lot of loneliness."
Ensler thinks that the unique Jewish legacy of storytelling and
humor has been an influence in her work as a dramatist.
"It's a very Jewish thing," she said, "this weeping
and laughing at the same time; these extreme emotions. And in the
theatre, you are free to go there."
Growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in New York, she said she identified
with Judaism, but wasn't quite of it. Everybody except Jews sees
her as Jewish, she observed: "My relationship with being Jewish
is complex, because my father was Jewish, but my mother wasn't."
In her preface to the play, she unflinchingly confronts her own
obsession with her "imperfect" belly and the underlying
self-hatred that became the driving force behind the research that
preceded the writing. She spent three years in what she describes
as a "dialogue" with her own despised stomach and talked
to women in 40 countries. No matter where she went, she found that
an overwhelming majority loathed some part of their anatomy and
lived with the never-ending quest to "fix" themselves.
Only in Africa and among an older generation in India did she encounter
women who were untouched by this deep sense of their own imperfection.
So what's going on? Why are women so pathetically eager to go on
never-ending diets, endure bloody operations, teeter around on life-threatening
and foot-deforming heels and spend their leisure time obsessing
about their looks?
Ensler has three words for them: patriarchy, religion and capitalism.
Patriarchy, as we know, has always cast a jaundiced eye at what
Simone de Beauvoir once called the second sex.
"The same is true of patriarchal religion," said Ensler,
"which has always held that women are in desperate need of
controlling and 'fixing.' They're never quite right. Furthermore,
women's bodies have always been identified with nature and nature
is what we control, exploit and rape. These ancient attitudes have
found their most potent expression yet in a consumer culture that
promises to end all anxieties and fix all imperfections – for
a price."
Ensler is taking it all on – with this play, she wants to "help
women break free." In the preface to The Good Body,
she says, "This is my prayer, my attempt to analyze the mechanisms
of our imprisonment, to break free so that we may spend more time
running the world than running away from it; so that we may be consumed
by the sorrow of the world rather than consuming to avoid that sorrow
and suffering."
The Good Body is playing at the Centre for the Performing
Arts in Vancouver from April 18 to 23. For tickets, call 604-280-4444.
Monika Ullmann is a Vancouver freelance writer and editor.
She can be reached at [email protected].
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