Dialogue: Turning V-word into religion

By DIANA WICHTEL

I'm beginning to feel like one those people who were born in the era of the horse and carriage and lived to see space shuttles. I can recall going to see the movie version of James Joyce's harmless, mildly erotic Ulysses. Not only was it R21 - yes, really - but we were made to see it in gender-segregated audiences. What on earth did they think Molly Bloom's soliloquy was going to drive us to do, apart from yawn violently?

Now here I am trooping into an Auckland theatre with an audience that's probably 50 per cent slightly sheepish-looking men to hear Lucy Lawless, Danielle Cormack and Madeleine Sami boldly go to mainstream entertainment's final frontier, The Vagina Monologues. Is nothing sacred any more?

I spent the 1970s avoiding this sort of thing. Not for me those feminist, self-help, BYO speculum groups. I'm also fiercely allergic to the New Age mumbo jumbo about goddesses and calling post-menopausal women crones.

But clearly something was going on here. Paul Holmes was certainly excited. He had the three actresses on his breakfast show to make a world record attempt on saying the word vagina on the radio. Once he started there was no stopping him. And any play that upsets Leighton Smith can't be all bad.

So we went. Was I empowered? Not really. Although the lone bloke sitting next to me was. His hoots of merriment, shrieks of delight and enthusiastic c-word chanting made it quite hard to concentrate on Danielle Cormack's astonishing repertoire of feigned orgasms.

Is it radical? The play will be a relief to those generations of women who embarked upon their sex lives armed only with their mother's advice that boys can't control themselves and the girl must take all the responsibility. Of course they were right. But that embattled stance left little room for women to explore their own sexuality, which is at least partly why Monologues has struck such a chord.

And clearly there is a taboo being broken here. Even after seeing the play, vagina is not a word to be uttered lightly. Unless you're Paul Holmes. Though how much of a taboo really still exists after Sex and the City? This is something we debated on the way home. I pointed out that they showed The Naked Penis on local television last year. You could never, I said, see the female equivalent of that in primetime. Oh yes you could, said my partner. As it turns out, he's right. Britain's irrepressible Channel 4 has made a series called Private Parts. One episode is snappily entitled "The Clitoris Uncovered". No doubt we'll see it here one day. You've been warned.

Was The Vagina Monologues good theatre? Absolutely. American playwright Eve Ensler has cleverly packaged wimmins studies material for a mainstream audience. It's mostly well-written and often hilarious, owing a large debt to the more anatomical fringes of stand-up - or in this case sit-down - comedy.

And it's short. In the end the best of the monologues are about great characters telling a story and, when performed as well as these actors mostly do, it ceases to matter much what they are about. It's like being on a nudie beach. After a bit, you stop noticing everyone's naked.

The darker monologues were less successful. Lucy Lawless was good, but not quite up to the master class standard of the other two, so it was unfortunate she was given the monologue of a survivor of a Bosnian rape camp. It sat uneasily with "If Your Vagina Got Dressed", as was highlighted by the way a large segment of the audience the night I went kept laughing merrily at every mention of vagina until they finally realised this one wasn't meant to be funny.

Did I chant? Er ... no. But we were up in the nosebleed seats, so no one noticed this failure to get into the spirit of the event. And that's the problem: what exactly is the spirit of this event? It started out simply enough. Eve Ensler realised she was, as it were, sitting on a goldmine. Good on her. I wish I'd thought of it.

But what is really just a safely naughty, mildly cathartic, feel-good night out has become a slightly scary industry, certainly in America. There are V signs, Vagina Friendly buttons and what Ensler describes as the regulation red feather boa. Valentine's Day, traditionally representing romance, has been appropriated and is now V-Day, representing guess what?

Of course it's all in a good cause. V-Day raises money for groups who fight violence against women. But last year's V-Day performance at Madison Square Garden sounded worrying. According to slightly horrified reports, there was a Vulva Choir of famous Monologues alumni performing orgasmic moaning. In the climax, Oprah - who else? - performed the ritualistic lifting of a veil from an Afghani activist. With the singing, moaning and baptismal-type rituals, it all sounds more like a Billy Graham revival - or worse, a Nuremberg rally - than a play.

In an interview Lawless spoke of the play giving her a new respect for the sacredness of the vagina. Sacred things are usually associated with some sense of the forbidden, some degree of taboo. Can you have it both ways? If the idea is to demystify a body part, you shouldn't then turn it into the Ten Commandments.

The world can always use another good play. It really doesn't need any more religions or the spectre of elections the world over being fought by V signing, red boa-clad, moaning members of the Vagina Party.

Although, judging by the play's popularity with local audiences, if the Alliance finds itself looking for a new name, it could do worse.