Battle of the Bulge

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The New York Sun

Eve Ensler isn’t shy about her bona fides. Her new play “The Good Body” concerns the female form – the tummy, specifically. Before long she rolls up her shirt and allows the congregation to glimpse the object of such charged emotion.


But these are not the bona fides that matter. (Everybody’s got a tummy, and plenty of them are more problematic than Ms. Ensler’s.) The real source of her singular authority is splayed across the stage of the Booth. As audience members file in, they are invited to contemplate a different kind of stature: a massive collage of photographs and news clippings about Ms. Ensler, from all over the globe, that covers the stage. My favorite is projected towards the leftmost edge. A photograph shows Ms. Ensler, arms curled in front of her, as if engaged in a mighty act of uplift. The headline reads, “Il coraggio de dire vagina.”


When Ms. Ensler began performing “The Vagina Monologues” eight years ago, she was a little-known playwright and activist. Now she is a worldwide celebrity, her severe bangs and dark bob familiar from West Hollywood to East Africa. V-Day, an organization inspired by her play, has raised awareness (and millions of dollars) to combat violence against women. “The Good Body” continues Ms. Ensler’s campaign to improve the standing of women, at home and abroad. She wants to use her celebrity for good, and has chosen a topic – women’s harmful self-image – that lends itself to stridency. The combination sets off all sorts of warning signals.


It’s a credit to Ms. Ensler’s smarts and humor that her play mostly avoids knotty traps. Like “The Vagina Monologues,” the new play consists of first person monologues and interviews. On her travels as an activist/theatrical, she got Helen Gurley Brown to talk about her face-lifts and adolescent acne, a Brazilian model to describe her rhinoplasty-based relationship with her surgeon husband, and an inmate at a fat camp to deride “skinny bitches.” It didn’t take much persuading.


Ms. Ensler and her subjects describe plenty of shocking, appalling things that women do to look better. Images of these procedures sometimes flash on a screen behind her – at one point, I caught a glimpse of hacksaw. The key to Ms. Ensler’s play is the double meaning of “good.” She believes, and wants us to believe, that the root of the problem is a confusion between having a good body being a good person. That confusion – perpetuated by the beauty industry, among countless others – wreaks havoc on women’s lives.


The play doesn’t bother trying to demolish those outside forces. Ms. Ensler’s real concern is getting women to understand how those forces work on individual minds. “I performed ‘The Vagina Monologues’ for six years,” says Ms. Ensler. “I had finally come to like my vagina. Until one day I realized the self-hatred had just crept up into my stomach.” Obsession with a stomach or some other feature is only the smoke of some distant fire: feeling out of control, living up to parental expectations. This is hardly a revolutionary discovery. Still, it bears repeating.


“The Good Body” would suit a civic center almost as well as a Broadway stage. And Ms. Ensler, it must be said, is not much of an actor. Unlike, say, Sarah Jones or Heather Raffo, who use the intricacies of character to create some reality, Ms. Ensler uses character merely to illustrate some reality. Again and again, the show gets a lift from the healthy sense of self-deflation in her monologues, her winning irony. “My stomach is America,” she says. If you heard a line like that at a poetry slam, you would not be at the poetry slam for very long.


Only in the last few scenes does she succumb to treacly solo-show-ism. It takes Ms. Ensler – brave open-minded New Yorker! – successive epiphanies in Africa, India, and Afghanistan to see the error of her obsessive, self agonizing ways. “I’m a tree,” she learns in Africa; in Afghanistan, she eats ice cream on behalf of oppressed people everywhere. This may make the whole enterprise of “The Good Body” seem a little silly. But, well, what have you done to advance global civil rights lately?


Ms. Ensler doesn’t belabor the point, but you can see her trying to link the liberation of women from People Magazine on one hand, and the Taliban on the other. A little tenuous, maybe, but the relationship is essentially true. The whole history of international development teaches the importance of educating a society’s women. There’s no reason why the lesson holds any less in America than in Burkina Faso. If you’re unconvinced of the necessity, or the high stakes, of empowering women just now, the recent murder of Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker who documented the inhumane treatment of women in fundamentalist Islamic societies, is worth your consideration.


“The Good Body” shows Ms. Ensler’s limitations as a dramatist, and has a deeply lopsided appeal – no trouble getting into the men’s room, I noticed. Still, at its sharpest moments, the show offers the pleasant reminder that a good cause can also be a good time.


Until January 16 (222 W. 45 Street, 212-239-6200).


The New York Sun

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