Eve Ensler ‘s Vagina Monologues, does little for the mind; or the vagina for that matter, except liberating the word from the confines of medical dictionary. What it really targets instead is the heart, with a concoction of warm, thick, frothy stories that bring forth bittersweet sexual experiences of every day women. I Am an Emotional Creature (directed by Mahabanoo Mody Kotwal and Kaizaad Kotwaal) is a follow up; like a shadow that trails the light. This time Ensler goes straight for the heart, but gets nowhere instead.
The new set of monologues is carved out of stories Ensler gathered from across the world, thinly veiled as fiction. The play opens with that tiring cliché about liberation – Queen’s I Want To Break Free – crooned live and out-of-tune only to be followed by a chorus of actors lamenting the state of the world in platitudes and asking what it means to be a woman in 2010. The production is tacky and the actors plastic enough to put Barbie to shame. But Ensler sets Barbie up for introspection through one of her characters- a Chinese factory worker, earning a meager wage, who ekes out her relationship with the doll she manufactures.
Initially the playwright is concerned about HIV, teenage pregnancy, sexual repression and the pressures of being thin and pretty. But before you know it, she has left the familiar far behind to hit the harsh terrains of rape, sexual slavery, prostitution and incarceration. By now, shocking is being confused with moving, and reality with truth. There is nothing to be said before the plight of victims here, however mediocre the words that string it. But you do wonder if such extreme human suffering is not gender- unspecific.
The specific crime of rape is perpetrated mostly against women, but the intensity of these monologues focus on the phenomenon of cruelty and pain, which transcends redemption and raises existential questions about human psychology and fate at large. Yes, there are women here who refused to kill people in the name of nationalism, but their voice could as easily have been a man’s, except it isn’t. The experiences women go through and the obvious emotional reactions to those circumstances do not automatically hold the key to their minds and dilemmas. There is nothing in this play about the inner journey of the woman- the battles she fights in her head everyday, the quandary of her unique mental makeup in the man-made world she is keen to inherit or, the dichotomies that sometimes make her, her own worst enemy.
This is an early 20th century feminist discourse in a post-feminist urban world. Even the second wave of the 60’s feminists were making more subtle cases about psychological and cultural domination.
This is not to say women are just fine now but today their issues need examination at a micro level that propaganda cannot afford. Cultural and religious specificity play an important part here. And that kind of insight is sorely missed while actors (ironically dolled up in the image of ‘beauty’ the play seeks to look beyond), flash their middle fingers and ‘attitude’. The brandished coolth is a little passe for this generation.
Self-expression is introduced with another cliché – dance, translated on stage by uncomfortably choreographed pieces that fail to represent the spirit of abandon. (Why didn’t they just let the girls get on to stage and do their own thing to music rather than hire a choreographer and advertise his ‘Slumdog Millionaire fame’ on the publicity material?). There isn’t much to be said for a play that talks of breaking the moulds, without investing in its own agenda.
The stories fail to touch your heart, functioning only as evidence of some sort. There was an image of the liberalized woman constructed by the post 50’s feminists to counter her regressive portrayal by the conservative old world order. It had to be white, to counter an unrelenting black, but the heart of the evolving woman is multi-hued and its nuances accessible more through poetry than polemic.
(Originally appears in HT Cafe)
Pragya Tiwari 