The Vagina Monologues
at North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The Vagina Monologues is an Obie-winning work, based on Ensler’s interviews with women, at the center of a new movement. Valentine’s Day 1999 was the second annual “V-Day,” part of an international campaign encouraging the use of theater to raise awareness of violence against women. Ensler herself staged the first benefit in New York in 1998 with an all-star cast that included Glenn Close, Lily Tomlin, Calista Flockhart, and Whoopi Goldberg. Booth’s production this year at the Goodman studio was a benefit for Center Theater’s new antiviolence program, TeenReach. Its powerful, diverse cast of ten included Jenny Magnus, MaryAnn Thebus, Jennifer Biddle, Kimberlee Soo White, and Alexandra Billings in these remarkable stories about sex, childbirth, rape, and menstruation, not to mention deceptively simple meditations on the nature of that rarely discussed body part, the vagina. Booth allowed each actor to find her center in these monologues, dialogues, and choral interludes, then to fly into lyrical confessions. The cast’s emotional honesty and joy in the script were obvious; the evening felt more like an intimate event in a salon than a theater piece.
Vogel’s Pulitzer-winning memory play tells the story of Li’l Bit, a woman who’d been molested by an uncle who also gave her driving lessons and supported her wish to go to college. Vogel has called this play her “Lolita,” after Nabokov’s 1955 novel about a middle-aged man involved with a young girl. Her script shows us a present-day Lolita’s equally tortured side of the story, capturing not only the girl’s suffering but the pederast’s vulnerability and Li’l Bit’s collusion in her own oppression. But despite its grim subject, How I Learned to Drive is genuinely funny, even charming. Vogel leads the audience into the past and back to the present, where an adult Li’l Bit, haunted by her Uncle Peck, is trying to learn to understand and forgive his behavior. Vogel’s simple yet layered story is written with such grace and almost Spartan clarity that it requires little tinkering, but Booth directs with just enough assertiveness to make the story’s intimate jokes and secrets irresistible.
The success of this choral character switching is due in large part to Linda Roethke’s costuming choices, whether bold transformations of the actor or little touches. Dressing Watson in a convincing fat suit, she ages the young actor 40 years, and she uses easily identified, quickly changed accessories to suggest different roles and time periods–a hair band, baseball cap, or leather jacket. Todd Rosenthal’s screens and projected images bring remembered rooms and events into sharp focus, while Liz Lee’s lighting creates distinct spaces on what first seems a naked stage, casting shadows that obscure but never completely hide the watchful chorus and that occasionally emphasize Uncle Peck’s lurking presence.
