In progress:
The last frontier
By Holly Pelham
Sophia Al-Maria, a third year English literature undergraduate at the American University in Cairo (AUC) made her directorial debut in Egypt's first performance of the Vagina Monologues . Written by Eve Ensler in 1998, the play is an exploration and celebration of female sexuality and has spawned a global grass-roots movement called V-Day. The cast of nine women, all amateurs, played to a packed house on three consecutive nights at the Howard Theatre. The performances raised almost LE8000 which is being donated to a shelter for battered women -- the first of its kind in the Arab world -- expected to open in Cairo later this year.
Eve Ensler spoke to hundreds of women around the world about their vaginas and out of these honest and often moving interviews came the Vagina Monologues. The purpose of the play is both to help women feel more in touch and comfortable with the ultimate symbol of their sexuality and identity -- their vagina -- and to make the audience take a stand against actions which violate women. To some extent it's designed to shock which I think is a good thing -- sometimes you have to shake people up to get them to listen to what you're saying. The shock works on two levels: by using words that are generally avoided and by relating stories that we don't often hear in everyday conversation because women are reluctant to talk about them -- stories of lesbian encounters, rape or abuse.
My interest in the play started last year when I was reading about V- Day on-line and I asked the performing and visual arts department at AUC if we could perform the Vagina Monologues. They said that they wanted nothing to do with it and that I would be crazy to attempt it. It was Kenne Dibner, a very active feminist studying at AUC, who had been heavily involved with V-Day and directed it in the US, who gave us the push we needed to make the show happen. We spread the word that we were casting and asked women we thought might be interested. Once we had collected enough women we gave them each a monologue. It turned out that only two of them had acted before.
I'm in Egypt alone, without an extended family, so I don't feel I was taking much of a personal risk co-directing this production. Having said that, this is something that I really believe in and I think that even if I did have family here I would do it anyway. But I know that a lot of the girls felt very differently and were extremely worried about their families finding, hence why they have refused to talk to the press or have their names printed. Many of the girls were also nervous about their families coming to see the show and I really sympathise with their fears. I have tremendous respect for them, especially with those who had to perform in front of their parents. I'm not sure that I would have been able to go up on stage in front of my father, for example, and pretend to have an orgasm like one of the girls did.
There are passages I absolutely love in the Monologues, such as "the woman who loved to make vaginas happy", which is the story of the ex- lawyer sex worker. Although I was originally worried about the audience reaction to this one it turned out to be the real crowd pleaser.
On a more serious note, the only monologue that ever brought me to tears is the one called "my vagina is my village". This is a story based on the collective account of women whom Eve Ensler spent time with in the rape camps of Bosnia and Kosovo. It tells the story of a young woman who connects her vagina with her village. Both have been ravaged, torn apart. It's tragic and the words are extremely moving. It's a very strong anti-war statement.
I had never seen the play performed, or not until the night before the show opened when somebody lent me the DVD. I watched it and thought this is nothing like what we're doing. It jolted me a bit because it was far less sexual and a lot more humorous, which might seem ironic. But in fact I think that is to be expected -- the more repressed women's sexuality is, the more wild they are when they can actually express it whether it be through somebody else's words or their own. I think it wasn't so much that we chose to focus on female sexuality as much as the fact that it leaned in that direction naturally. The women in the cast were given a chance to be sexual and they went as far as they could with that.
I was shocked at the success of the show. Apparently 80 people were turned away on the last night. Each night I had to make a short announcement before the play started and each night the audience got bigger and bigger. It was inspiring to know so many people were interested -- and I don't think it was only because of the controversy that preceded it. As is well known, when Eve Ensler came to Cairo in 2002 she gave an impromptu performance of the Vagina Monologues at the Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women (ADEW), an NGO based in Cairo to promote women's rights. The performance received a lot of publicity at the time, not least because some of the representatives present from other NGOs were shocked by it. They called ADEW pornographers, among other things, and demanded an apology.
Given Eve Ensler's previous experience, one of our concerns was not so much that we would get into trouble but that we would create difficulties for the university, which we were keen to avoid. We put up a notice next to the door to the theatre stating that this was an independent project and AUC had no affiliation with the production. We weren't asked to do that -- it was actually my co-director's idea -- and I typed something up half and hour before the first show to make sure it was clear that AUC had nothing to do with the production.
In fact we didn't really have any interaction with the censors at all. The only censoring there was we did ourselves. For instance we toned down some of the lines and decided not to use certain props which we thought were too racy. Apart from making small changes to the text to make it more relevant to Egypt, such as substituting Egyptian words or places and changing some of the accents, we kept pretty firmly to the script. Although I think that Eve Ensler does her best to draw on as wide a range of women as possible, one of the criticisms of the work is that it largely consists of Western women's experiences. I would have liked to have made it more relevant to an Egyptian audience by including actual monologues from Arab women in general and Egyptian women in particular. I don't think it would be easy to get Egyptian women to talk about the issues raised in the play and perhaps that's the reason there aren't any Arab contributions.
I don't think I want to direct in theatre again for a long time! Having said that, it would be good to make the Vagina Monologues an annual event here in Egypt, as it is elsewhere in the world. It is also important for more people to see the play, including men, because it's a window on the way that women feel.
