Playwright, activist, and performer Eve Ensler enlightened millions of women about their bodies and potential with her empowering The Vagina Monologues. (Men learned a lot from it, too.) In her latest piece, In the Body of the World, Ensler delivers a frank, fearless monologue that chronicles her battle with advanced uterine cancer.
The story that Ensler tells over 80 minutes is smart, harrowing, surprisingly humorous, and can serve as an inspiration for anyone, female and otherwise, confronted by serious illness.
In 2010, just as the 56 year-old Ensler was preparing to inaugurate a sanctuary place for victims of rape in Congo, she was diagnosed with a tumor in her uterus. As Ensler tells it, she was more annoyed than scared over the situation: “For the record, I stopped drinking 34 years ago. I quit smoking 20 years ago. I’m a vegetarian, an activist. I express my emotions a lot, I walk everywhere, I lift weights, and I had an incredible amount of sex.” So why should she be going under the knife for cancer?
Ensler’s uterus, ovaries, and other parts were removed during a nine-hour operation, but that’s only the initial bout in this fight to recovery. Among her story’s episodes, Ensler tells of a handsome doctor at the Mayo Clinic, an arrogant surgeon at Sloan-Kettering, and a sensitive physician at Beth Israel Hospital. Ensler describes how she transcended the fiery pains of chemo by believing it was purging her body free of all negative influences. She recalls friends who comforted her and the unexpected devotion of a semi-estranged sister she came to love again. She flies across the country to pay a heartbreaking visit to her cool, ever-remote mother, who is dying of cancer and dementia and unwilling to recognize it.
The text often is composed as a series of terse sentences that provide verbal momentum for Ensler’s performance. The writer’s snarky sense of humor at times brightens the proceedings with laughter. Informed by doctors that they might need to radiate her vagina, Ensler snaps, “Do you have any idea who I am? Do you have any fucking sense of irony?”
Speaking candidly of the physical and mental nightmares that she endured, Ensler not only exposes her surgery scars to the audience, but in one of the show’s most striking moments, she removes her trademark Louise Brooks coif to reveal a bald head.
Do not expect a mere me-me-me aria: What elevates In the Body of the World beyond many other cancer survivor stories is that every so often Ensler focuses beyond her body to consider the world of women she left in Congo. Detailing how they suffered through atrocities by marauding soldiers, Ensler implies that these comrades have survived worse events than her struggle. Late in the monologue, Ensler asserts how this experience has generated a second wind that will carry her through life.
Manhattan Theatre Club’s premiere is paced well and staged concisely by Diane Paulus, lately noted for directing elaborate events such as Broadway’s Pippin revival. Inspired by Ensler’s mentions of jungle and foliage imagery, Paulus and set designer Myung Hee Cho complete the show with an amazing visual coup—not to be revealed here—that transports the audience from a dark, scary place into a wonderfully verdant world.
In the Body of the World opened February 6 at New York City Center Stage I and runs through March 25. Information and tickets: manhattantheatreclub.org.
