Why I did a ‘Vagina’ monologue

Well, you could say because I was born for the theater. Oh, how I wish! But really, my earliest childhood games were about setting up plays with my brothers and sisters. Most of our days were spent (especially endless summer days!) under the direction of Jed, the eldest. He took charge of scripts, music and rehearsals. Chin and Coke were in charge of set design and we girls were in charge of tickets and posters. This is all in my memory, of course; maybe we all did everything together. We called ourselves The Young Players Group and we took ourselves very seriously, as children are wont to do while playing.

And so, when Missy Maramara, the theater actress, asked me ever so casually if I wanted to be part of a school production of The Vagina Monologues, I barely hesitated! The call to perform was just too good to pass up. Just in case you’ve been living in a cave the past few years, The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler is a series of monologues based on interviews with all kinds of women who speak freely about their vaginas. These monologues discuss a variety of women’s concerns: menstruation, intercourse, childbirth, rape, sexuality, etc. The tone of the play is honest and forthright.

I also took the role partly to — How do I say it? — validate myself as a classroom teacher and as a member of the academic community. Five years ago, our school tried to put on this play but the idea was met with strong opposition. The school was literally polarized — some members were utterly against staging it; other members were just as fervent about the validity of the play. There were debates, forums and endless discussions, a true testament to the power of the play’s content. And at the end of the day, it was not staged.

Five years ago, I did not know where I stood. Certainly, in my heart, as an artist, I felt very much oppressed by the idea that another artist was being censored. But there was a teacher in me, too, and a mother — a niggling, nagging feeling that my students may not be mature enough, or prepared enough for… blinding enlightenment. Yet.

To find a way around this, and to maybe grapple with the issue a bit more, I took to teaching the play to my students. Reading a play is much different from performing it; as words, meaning can be easier to grasp when read on the page. A text is linear and logical and one only has to unravel the written words. Staging a text is altogether a different story. On stage, light, music, tone, costume, sets are added and a text becomes fluid and multi-dimensional. I wanted to provide that for my students, and so, as a final class project, we decided to stage, not The Vagina Monologues, but our own monologues. The men had to give penis monologues as well.

And there we were, all 17 of us, including myself, as we delivered these monologues. Because they were in an artistic form, they were insightful, tender, truthful and extremely powerful. Really, it is no cliché: the truth will set you free. This experience made it easier for me to understand the two sides of the coin, so to speak. Now I was certain which side I was on.

The monologue I was given was entitled "Hair," and it spoke of a married woman’s experience when her husband asked her to shave off her hair "down there." We were pretty much left on our own to develop an interpretation and, as I read the script repeatedly, I saw the character as someone who had survived a traumatic experience, but who had managed to escape and so therefore was delivering this monologue in order to tell other women that it is possible to leave such a situation. To me, the monologue was a testament to a woman’s strength of character; it spoke of a woman’s choice of her self over the desires of another.

After delivering the monologue the first night, I was told by some of the other actresses (we were around 20, including teachers and students) that I had not been angry, or pissed off, enough. That jarred me into rethinking my interpretation of the character. Was my interpretation of her inner peace more a reading of myself? I looked at the words once again and tried very hard to muster the necessary anger (I suppose anger on stage is far more interesting to see than reconciliation). And I did find the anger — for her husband who made her do something she did not like; the anger in dealing with the pain of shaving one’s hair; her anger with the therapist who blamed her for the husband’s infidelity. But I played the anger only up to a point; in the end, I tried to play her as a heroine. These are my character’s last lines:

"I realized then that hair is there for a reason. It’s the leaf around the flower. It’s the lawn around the house. You have to love hair in order to love a vagina. You can’t just pick the parts you want. And besides, my husband never stopped screwing around."

And I guess I did a Vagina monologue because I wanted to push myself and feel the exhilarating power of terror. As a woman, I have felt the imperative to liberate my own self, especially against what people (what we call society — that mass of strangers we blame everything on) think I can or should do. I stood there in front of 300 people in stage makeup, having memorized three pages of lines, the spotlight shining down on me. The skills necessary to fulfill that monologue are stupendous! Your memory must be sharp, your body has to be alert, your heart must be strong and your humility even stronger. Talk about fuel to the fire! Talk about a shot in the arm! This, I thought, is better than botox.

Last week was International Woman’s Day but I do invite all of us to keep celebrating womanhood every day. I want us all to keep reminding women of choices that they can make; that they can choose anger and they can choose peace and they can choose silence and they can choose candor and they can choose to do battle and they can choose to watch and they can choose family and they can choose solitude and they can choose freedom and they can choose life.

P.S. This summer, I begin my very first Creative Writing Summer Group. If you’ve been wanting to write, or if you’ve been writing, or if you have that tiny voice inside of you that’s been saying, "I think I want to write!" do come join me for seven consecutive Saturdays beginning April 17. If you’re interested, e-mail Rica.Santos@gmail.com or text 0917-8830728. I can’t wait to hear from you!