The Saturday, March 7 afternoon performance of The Vagina Monologues has sold out, but the producers and cast have agreed to add a second show at the Heritage Playhouse in Gibsons the same evening.
If tickets for the extra show sell well, the all-volunteer production will meet and possibly exceed its fundraising goal of $5,000 for the Together Against Violence project run by Sunshine Coast Community Services Society.
“We’re really thrilled about the second show,” director Kim Kerr Fenton said in an interview prior to a Feb. 23 rehearsal at Gibsons Public Market. “It’s a tough sell, raising money for a program that focuses on violence and prevention of violence… We’re not talking about cute little puppies here, we’re talking about people in your neighbourhood who are getting hurt, and nobody likes to think about that. Nobody likes to think that there’s violence in our beautiful community.”
Playwright Eve Ensler has described the play, written in 1996, as, “a wildly divergent gathering of female voices,” all talking about vaginas, theirs and others’, from grandmothers to young women, from sex workers to the sexually inexperienced, some lamenting the female organ’s degradation, others celebrating its wonders.
In 1998, Ensler made the theatrical property available royalty-free during February and early March for community groups to use as a non-profit fundraiser. Since then, such annual presentations have raised more than $100 million.
This production, mounted by Fenton and producer Jenny Biltek, has 18 speaking roles, featuring women in their 20s to their 60s. “We’ve got a great cast,” said Fenton. “Amber has a disability. We have women that identify as non-gender and those that identify as gendered as women, women who are lesbians. We have people who work in the sex trade, who work in health care, we have moms, we have sisters, we’ve got everybody.”
The two-to-ten-minute monologues provoke everything from tears of stunning sadness to tears of uproarious laughter. Among the hilarious bits is one by Paula Howley, where she plays a lawyer turned dominatrix who works only with women, to help them overcome their reluctance to vocalize their sexual bliss.
“So many women feel like they can’t express their pleasure in sexuality, especially vocally because people make fun, or complain, or ostracize or whatever,” Howley said. “[My character] talks about how she felt like she had to choke back her moans of pleasure and how that actually affected her body, how she got headaches and stress-related disorders until she was, like, ‘I’m hurting myself, why am I doing this?’ She discovered she really loves giving other women pleasure and pushing them through their fears of expressing their pleasure, too.”
Howley’s monologue ends with a side-splitting demonstration of 19 varieties of sexually ecstatic moaning. Yes, 19. Howley’s is just one of the many engaging, moving, and passionate performances in this play. Men might find it all highly informative, if occasionally jaw-dropping. Tickets are $25, available at www.share-there.com.
