Vaginas Occupy Wall Street
by Mariya Yefremova
This weekend, Eve Ensler, author of the Vagina Monologues, debuted the newest addition to the Monologues, written about Occupy Wall Street. The program featured sixteen monologues with a finale by Ensler herself as a special production of Monologues with Occupy Wall Street, Vaginas Occupy Wall Street. As someone who has seen Monologues performed before in college and who has read the book several times, I did not expect to be surprised. Yet, surprised I was.
The performance began with the Occupy mic check, a call and response where the first performer yelled out “Vaginas! Occupy! Wall Street!” and the audience gladly mimicked. The mic check was utilized again twice during the evening. The second time, the audience was asked to do a mic check for the word “cunt” during the “Reclaiming Cunt” monologue, where the usage of the word cunt is preferred and encouraged to the more technical and less sexy term of vagina. Screaming ‘cunt’ over and over again with my fellow audience members was a liberating, freeing and communal experience. The third time, Eve Ensler asked the audience to participate in a moaning mic check after her own finale, harkening back to “The Woman Who Loves to Make Vaginas Happy” monologue, featuring a sex worker who describes the variety of moaning women express as they receive pleasure. Eve Ensler asked us to moan, so, we moaned. In the grand finale (pun intended), we all joined in sounding out short bursts of moans, screams, exclamations, and various guttural sounds. We left feeling relieved. It was an evening of opening, listening, and this was our way of sharing and connecting to the Monologues and the women behind them. Did I expect the 50-year-old woman next to me to yell out cunt? No. Did I expect the two college guys behind me to simulate a woman’s orgasm? Definitely not. But that is the beauty of the monologues, they are always evolving, taking new shape, acquiring a different life. They are always surprising you.
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