Review: The Vagina Monologues

The Vagina Monologues is one of those plays that everyone has heard of and no one has seen. It has become synonymous with rousing feminist revivals and student drama departments, but I have yet to find someone else who has viewed this thing. I blame the name.

It just seems like it’s all there in the title. You think, ‘Oh, I bet that’s going to be a series of monologues about or performed by vaginas. I can imagine that. Guess I’ll just stay home and watch Made in Chelsea reruns.’ Then you do.

Also, a whole lot of our male students are frightened by vaginas, because my gender was definitely underrepresented in the audience. C’mon you cowards, vaginas don’t bite! Well, except in that one movie I won’t mention. Shudder.

However, I found that all those notions I dragged into the theatre with me were a bit off. First, The Vagina Monologues isn’t a play at all. It may have started out that way, but now it’s more like the theatrical cornerstone of the V-Day movement, which raises money to stop violence against women. Maybe I’m the only one who didn’t know this, but I went in expecting a diatribe and left with a message, and I think that’s really cool!

So what is the Vagina Monologues actually like? It is, yes, a series of monologues about women reflecting on, or gazing into, their vaginas. However, this is really more of a jumping-off point to talk about femininity, cultural perceptions women face, and violence against women. What makes all of this especially interesting is that the monologues are (according to the play) taken or composited from real interviews with over 200 women. Each scene becomes a game of guessing or imagining where the actual women end and the playwright’s authorial license begins. It’s rather like reading an old elementary school essay that you just know your mum helped you out on. Some parts may be too simple, others surprisingly profound, but you can only guess at whether you were an occasional child genius or your mom just knew exactly what a ten-year old would say about dinosaurs.

So how did first-time directors Kit Millar and Casey Waldman’s St Andrews debut handle all of this? Luckily, not all of our students are so frightened by certain parts of the female anatomy, because a few dauntless male actors contributed to make this a mixed-gender performance, something I thought added a lot to some of the pieces. For example, I personally found the most moving monologue to be ‘Say It’ from the first act, a stark testimonial from some of the surviving ‘Comfort Women’ of the second World War, women who were coerced or kidnapped into sexual slavery by the Japanese Military and have still received no official apology or acknowledgement from the Japanese government. This segment was adeptly performed by the three male members of the cast, Dylan James, Teddy Woodhouse, and James Jeffries-Chung, and I thought having male voices telling the stories added a very stirring element of apology and retribution. On a less sombre note, I also really enjoyed Hannah Franklin’s performance in the second act’s ‘The Flood’, a humorous account from one the oldest interviewees. Her character reminded me of a female Michael Caine—don’t think about that one before you go to sleep—but by hitting all the comic notes and keeping a really consistent tone, she lifted things back up after a few of the darker acts. The only monologue that I recognized from somewhere else is the notorious ‘The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy’, which includes about five minutes of various simulated orgasms. It’s certainly memorable, and Laura Macartney demonstrated a highly impressive… um… vocal range for this piece!

There are a few low notes as well though—most of this due to the material, not the cast. ‘My Vagina Was My Village’ and ‘What If I Told You I Did Not Have A Vagina’ are both intense but very similar monologues that occur too closely together and don’t offer anything more than a predictably western view of women in the third world. ‘The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could’ is a rightly controversial story that’s played off as a positive and redemptive, but seemed blindly tragic to me. However, I reiterate that this is purely a failure of the material itself.

Overall, this was an extremely fun performance. The cast seemed to have a great time, and the atmosphere was relaxed and informal. It’s a fun show for a good cause, but I’m not going to give it a score because, well, it’s for a good cause! Trust me, you’ll have a good time, it’s much better than Made in Chelsea, and your money will go to something useful for once. I was going to sign off this review with a joke about making a male version of The Vagina Monologues, but then I realized they already have. It’s called The Avengers. Boom, I’m outta here.