Eve Ensler, the Original 'Vagina Warrior,' Organizes Arts Festival

By FELICIA R. LEE
Published: June 12, 2006

It is the next level of the vagina franchise. Eve Ensler, the author of the continually performed "Vagina Monologues," was at a meeting in her Manhattan loft last week, discussing her ambitious arts festival, beginning today, focused on violence against women. Laptops and organizers at attention, the vagina warriors, as they call themselves, updated Ms. Ensler on everything from the publicity for the dozens of theater, music, film and community events to massages for participants from overseas.

Enlarge this Image

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Eve Ensler's arts festival focuses on violence against women.

"Has everyone heard that we'll have 10 days at Yankee Stadium?" Ms. Ensler asked, referring to an agreement to flash "Until the Violence Stops: NYC" and a message from male supporters on the stadium's giant digital screen.

"You should throw out the first pitch," someone piped up.

"Yeah," another women said. "We can say something about learning to pitch like a girl."
Although the room dissolved into laughter, Ms. Ensler was putting into motion her dream of saturating the city with her anti-violence message. (Red and pink advertisements for the campaign "to make New York City the safest place on earth for girls and women" have dotted subways for weeks now.) The festival expands the V-Day franchise, the global movement that Ms. Ensler ignited back in 1998 with benefit performances of "The Vagina Monologues," her play about women and their bodies.

That cultish 1996 Off Broadway show ultimately morphed into a nonprofit charity that has so far raised more than $35 million for programs designed to end violence against women. Worth magazine, in 2001, named V-Day one of the 100 best charities.

Although "Monologues" has occasionally raised outcries from conservatives who complain that it promotes homosexuality and underage sex, performances have become something of a staple on college campuses. This year alone 1,150 colleges and communities put together 2,700 V-Day events, occurring on or near Feb. 14, Valentine's Day.

"The best time to act is when you're at a place of success, you have the energy to go forth," Ms. Ensler said later over coffee. At 53, with her signature dark bob haircut, she looks much the same as she did when she first channeled many women's experiences for "Monologues." "The way you get people to deal with something is to saturate them with it. I can feel everywhere in the city that I go that people are talking about it, thinking about it."

The power of her Rolodex — all the festival celebrities and artists perform free — can be seen in the schedule: Jane Fonda, Kathy Bates, Marian Seldes and Kerry Washington read Ms. Ensler's play "Necessary Targets," about women and war, this evening at Studio 54. Tomorrow women from Afghanistan, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan, Iraq and, yes, New Orleans will discuss the play and kick off a V-Day campaign for women in "conflict zones."

Friday through Sunday there is a film festival at the Museum of the City of New York and the Museum of Television and Radio; on June 27, a co-ed run in Prospect Park. And on June 19, the Hammerstein Ballroom (where the first benefit performance of "The Vagina Monologues" raised $250,000 for New York City anti-violence groups in 1998) will be the site of "A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant and a Prayer," a series of works by writers including Edward Albee, Michael Eric Dyson and Anna Deavere Smith with scheduled performances by Brittany Murphy, Cynthia Nixon, Isabella Rossellini, Marlo Thomas, Rosario Dawson and others. Some events are free, other have tickets that start at $10. (The schedule is large and changing daily; vday.org has up-to-date details.)

The programming isn't the only thing that's big. The V-Day campaign has scooped up issues from rape to domestic violence to genital mutilation. That kind of wide-ranging do-gooding inspired the headline of a 2002 article in The New York Times Magazine about Ms. Ensler: "Eve Ensler Wants to Save the World."

Ms. Ensler doesn't worry about being considered grandiose. "When I started this 10 years ago, no one said the word 'vagina,' " she said. "Let's start there. Something has shifted in people.
"We started with 25 colleges that did productions of 'The Vagina Monologues.' Now there are 700. We've opened safe houses for girls in Africa, Egypt, South Dakota native lands, Iraq. We've supported school and orphanages in Afghanistan.

"People think you're crazy when you have dreams. Who cares if people think you're crazy? So what. Because you know what, I've seen changes."

And she is planning more. She said she wants to bring the festival to Chicago and a handful of other cities. In October her nonfiction book, "Insecure at Last: Losing It in a Security-Obsessed World" (Random House) is due out. And for the 10th anniversary of V-Day, she envisions a celebration at the Superdome in New Orleans.

For the two-week festival in New York, Ms. Ensler and her skeleton crew (no office, seven or eight paid staffers, a well-connected advisory board) raised about $1.2 million.

Jerri Lynn Fields, the executive director of V-Day, said the vagina warriors were able to jump-start the campaign because of their enormous base. They went on a retreat in July, she said, and began brainstorming about Ms. Ensler's dream of connecting all the strands of her work. The campaign didn't get any funds until December 2005, when the Rockefeller Foundation gave $500,000, followed by a contribution from Verizon and other sponsors, Ms. Fields said. Grass-roots groups are sponsoring most of the more than 50 festival events.

Dana Edell, 30, the co-founder and executive director of the viBe Theater Experience, which produces plays by teenage girls, recalled putting on her first production of "Monologues" five years ago, as a student at Columbia University. During the festival, her company and Here Arts Center will produce 12 performances by youths working against violence.

"It's so much bigger than a women's movement now," Ms. Edell said. "It's about communities speaking about all the darkness and violence in neighborhoods that doesn't get expressed. I can't name another artist or activist besides Eve Ensler who has gotten more attention to this. She's found a way to make this accessible, entertaining and moving."

Eryka Peskin, 32, a writer and social worker, said Ms. Ensler and last year's V-Day inspired her to found the Red Tent Women's Project, a community center in Park Slope, Brooklyn. For the festival, Red Tent is doing several things, including producing a play about domestic violence. As it turns out, Ms. Ensler's biggest resource may well be the women she has inspired over the years who are now rallying to support the festival. As Ms. Peskin said, "I want to be Eve Ensler when I grow up."