It’s been 30 years since Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues was first performed. Next week, it will be back on stage at Gonzaga University (February 12-14, Magnuson Theatre), read by more than 20 students, staff and faculty members. Leslie Stamoolis, the chair of the theater department, is directing it.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Leslie Stamoolis: The real power of the Vagina Monologues, I think, is in the fact that the word and the concept is spoken over and over and over again. There's so much power in giving something its proper name.
The reason that people got all up in arms about the Vagina Monologues early on was the fact that they were just saying the word vagina so many times. And people thought to themselves, wait, is that a bad word? And had to have that thought process of why do I think that it's a problem to say an anatomical term of the human body? So I think the power lies in giving a name to a female body part that over the centuries and millennia has been legislated to death, has been debated over who owns it.
DN: There doesn’t seem to be any uproar over next week’s performance of The Vagina Monologues, but Stamoolis says Gonzaga’s relationship with the play is an uneasy one.
LS: 2011 was the first time that The Vagina Monologues was performed on Gonzaga's campus, but it was not open to the public, and it was not advertised off campus or probably very much on campus.
A few years prior to that, maybe 2007, 2008, there was a group of students and some professors who wanted to produce it. The university would only let them produce it off campus, and they refused to let Gonzaga's name be affiliated with it.
In 2019, a student said to me, have you ever heard of The Vagina Monologues? And I said, yes. She said, I wish we could do that, but, you know, I'm a senior. And then I said to her, we should do it. And so we slipped it into our season in 2019.
At that time, we had our first female dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. We had a female academic vice president, Dr. Patricia Killen, and I spoke with both of them. Everyone was actually very supportive. They just wanted to make sure they knew what we were getting into. But I didn't have to convince anyone of the importance of the piece or the value of it or anything like that.
So that led to our first public performance performed here on campus but open to the public and we had a sold-out house. All the proceeds from that event were donated to the Spokane YWCA, as was required by the V-Day Foundation when you produce The Vagina Monologues in February.
This time around, I haven't even had any meetings. So we put it on the season and no one reached out or contacted me with any kinds of concerns.
I think that our folks here at Gonzaga have always understood that this is a significant piece of social justice theater. There are some who have problems with some of the content of the pieces. There are, of course, people who may have problems with just the celebration of the vagina. We're not interested in engaging with those folks.
There are people who have concerns about some of the depictions in the monologues that might be seen as positive but could be problematic. The key one is in a piece called The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could. It is about a young girl's memories from the age of five through the age of 16 and there's some pretty disturbing things that she has experienced, physically, sexually, at far too young an age, things like that. But then the final piece in that monologue is seen as a positive one, but it's a sexual encounter between a 16-year-old girl and a 24-year-old woman. So many people have problems with that, fully understandable.
However, what people sometimes fail to remember is that theater is not propaganda. It is, in fact, storytelling. No one ever accuses you of promoting regicide when you produce Hamlet, so I struggle to understand why people think that we are promoting something by doing The Vagina Monologues, because these are stories that are told by real women. They're sometimes a creation of a story from other sources, multiple women's stories. But they are, in fact, stories. So we can hold the tension of what may be hard to hear in some of these monologues while also understanding that it is important to hear it.
DN: The fact that it's not the lightning rod that it used to be, do you worry that's going to keep attendance down because it's not as "sexy" as it might have been in the past?
LS: I suppose we'll find out. I certainly hope it doesn't keep attendance down because we are still donating proceeds from our production to the Spokane YWCA to promote their work.
But I think in some ways, it's always going to be a lightning rod, actually, because we always have new generations who are growing up with a really positive idea of either the piece or just of the body part. We also have people who just want to be a little bit titillated and will come because they don't know exactly what they're going to hear, and they think, is it actually monologues about vaginas? And the answer is, yes, it is actually monologues about vaginas.
I think that there will always be folks who have problems with women's voices being heard in such a straightforward way. So I think that there will always be folks who have something to say about that for good or ill. But I think it remains unique. I think it's still, it's always going to have significance, both because the world is not yet perfect. Even as we bend towards justice, we haven't achieved it.
DN: So you have students and staff and faculty who are all part of this. Do you have to teach them differently? Some have the experience of having seen it before, been around in that world in 1996 versus students who haven't.
LS: Yes. I know what the experience is like for both of them because I first saw The Vagina Monologues at the University of Kentucky when I was a local high school student. And I was blown away by what I heard.
I remember what it was like to have the first experience with The Vagina Monologues. And then having lived with them now in my own life for almost 30 years, now directing it twice, my own experience in my own life has progressed so that I see different parts of the monologues in different ways as I age. So the staff and faculty in the room can give some of that perspective to the younger students, but the students also get to discover it afresh for themselves.
