Eve Ensler's newest play, The Good Body, opens on December 6, 2005 at the Majestic Theater as part of the Dallas Summer Musicals Broadway Contemporary Series. Ensler, who caused a minor sensation with The Vagina Monologues, a non-linear series of stories told to Ensler by women about their relationships with, to, and about their genitals, launched her V-Day movement worldwide to stop violence against women.
The Good Body moves up the anatomy several inches: Ensler fixates on her stomach. From her web site: "The Good Body is an inside look at the outside through personal anecdotes and first-hand interviews with women around the world, Eve examines how we truly feel about food, our bodies, and ourselves." In a recent phone conversation with Ensler, from her hotel in Miami where she was performing The Good Body at the Coconut Grove, she expounded on her philosophy about bodies:
PCP: Was there a specific etiology that spurred your fixation on your stomach?
Ensler: Being post 40, I think living in a consumer culture where we're never enough (ie. our features, weight, hair, etc.), our lack of worthiness, self-hatred, lack of self-esteem is vast.
PCP: How old were you when you first wrote the material for The Vagina Monologues?.
Ensler: That was 10 years ago; I was 42. I am 52, and I love being 52.
PCP: You mention in The Vagina Monologues that you were sexually abused as a child. Was the genesis of TVM born out of a need for catharsis and closure?
Ensler: I try not to psychoanalyze. I'm me, (but) I think the V-Day movement absolutely grew out of that. I traveled with the play [TVM] and I would meet so many women who had been abused, and obviously that resonated with my own abuse.
PCP: I've read your plays (The Vagina Monologues and The Good Body) and am impressed by your worldwide movement to end violence against women. Can you see any tangible results?
Ensler: Oh, God, yes! Over the last eight years, 30 million women have (found refuge) in Safe Houses in Africa where girls are no longer genitally mutilated [as well as] Safe Houses for battered and abused women in Cairo, Iraq and Afghanistan. We have seen people talking about issues they've never talked about before. In Iceland at a small festival in the country, where people get drunk, and a lot of girls were getting raped, after five years of V-Day, no rapes were reported. I'm not saying V-Day is the only reason.
PCP: Would you say it was a contributing factor?
Ensler: A big contributing factor; 2300 productions (of TVM) in 1100 cities in 81 countries have participated in the V-Day campaigns.
PCP: Where do you make your home?
Ensler: I live in the world at this time. I am a nomadic vagina floating through space. I have an apartment in New York where I have spent only two weeks in the past eight years.
PCP: What is your marital status?
Ensler: Single. I don't like the word, 'single,' it sounds like I am waiting to couple up. I live alone, and I'm deeply happy in my aloneness.
PCP: Do you have any children?
Ensler: I have an adopted son. I adopted him 30 years ago when I was married to his dad.
PCP: Do you have any grandchildren?
Ensler: I have two (granddaughters), nine years old and a newborn.
PCP: If you could say one thing to the people of Dallas about your show, The Good Body, what would it be?
Ensler: It's really funny; it's a call for women to be great rather than `good.'
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