‘You tell me, who’s oppressed?’

Eve Ensler on women: “If women actually loved their bodies, how much more energy and time and money we would have to enter into power in the world. Or looked at another way, to get elected.”

Eve Ensler takes on women’s obsessions

By JERRY TALLMER

The walls of her Chelsea apartment are a brilliant glossy Chinese red. Her suit, from India, is bright orange silk. Her hairdo is that of 1930s vamp Louise Brooks, her toenails, this day, are passion-candy pink. Eve Ensler doesn’t, at the moment, look what you would really call oppressed.

“You know,” she said, “oppression just manifests itself differently. When you’re insidiously oppressed by capitalism, it’s a whole other thing.

“In the course of my work I flew from Los Angeles, where women were tightening their vaginas and trimming their labia at a Vagina Laser Rejuvenation Center — and paying for it — flew from there to Kenya, where women were trying to stop female genital mutilation.

“So tell me — who’s oppressed?”

Her new play, the one that brings the Vagina Monologist to Broadway, no less, dramatizes testimony from women in Los Angeles, in New York City, in Puerto Rico, Italy, Rio de Janeiro, Africa, India, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. It’s called “The Good Body,” and it is performed, as were the first six years of “The Vagina Monologues,” by the playwright herself, solo.

The raison d’etre of “The Good Body” is conveyed right in its opening words, among them, these:

“Women I meet everywhere generally hate one particular part of their bodies. They spend most of their lives fixing it, shrinking it. They have medicine cabinets with products devoted to transforming it. They have closets full of clothes that cover or enhance it.

“What I can’t believe” — says Ensler straight out to the audience — “is that I, a radical feminist for nearly 30 years, could spend this much time thinking about my stomach. It has become my tormentor, my distractor; it’s my most serious committed relationship.”

Also this: “Saying the word vagina vagina vagina vagina a million times [in the six years of performance], I thought I was home free. I had finally come to love my vagina. Until one day I realized the self-hatred had just crept up into my stomach.”

Now, here in this building where she has lived for most of those same 30 years, she says, of the new villain in the piece, her tummy:

“Well, Jerry, it [the focus of aggravation] shifted. One day I just happened to look down, and there it was.” A motion of the hand indicates the anatomical area that, to an unbiased visiting observer, is neither too large nor too anything except quite normally attractive. If you like women, you have to, generally speaking, like their stomachs.

“I’m 51,” Eve Ensler said. “My body started changing when I reached my 40s, and I got in a panic. I spent hours and hours and hours of my time on diet and exercise and clothes — every single thing that surrounds the stomach — and it wasn’t working!

“What I learned is, the more you’re obsessed, the more you’re obsessed. Which is why this beauty-industrial complex is such a thing of genius. It’s why women in this country are spending $40 million a year on beauty products.

“If you spend all your time and money on beauty products, you won’t be running the world. It’s a capitalistic distraction, and keeps women hooked on this hate-myself, consume, hate-myself, consume treadmill. If women actually loved their bodies, how much more energy and time and money we would have to enter into power in the world. Or, looked at another way, to get elected.”

From the play, Ensler speaking the words of Isabella Rossellini, actress, model, former Lancome spokesperson:

“I wasn’t meek in the photographs, no. I knew how to express assertiveness. I knew the glamour of strong women who did what they wanted to do. Like Kahlo, Magnani, like Callas. I could do that in the photographs.

“The corporation accepted it — until I got stronger than the cream they were selling to make women better. The cream is the star, they said, not Isabella Rossellini. They sent me so many flowers on my fortieth birthday, I knew I was dead.”

Fired at 40 — “at the height of her prime,” said pink-toed Ensler, “in fantastic shape.”

And still is, murmured the unbiased visiting observer.

“Hel-lo!” said Eve Ensler.

From the play, Ensler speaking the words of Helen Gurley Brown:

“ ,,, 7, 8, 9. Eve, dear, come in pussycat. Give me a second. 99, 100.” (Stops, sits up.) “Eighty years old, one hundred sit-ups twice a day. I’m down to 90 pounds. Another ten years, I’ll be down to nothing. But even then I won’t feel beautiful. I accept this terrible condition. It’s driven me to be disciplined and successful. Through Cosmo I’ve been able to help women everywhere ... Everyone but me...

“Come on in, Eve, let’s get cozy. Help yourself to some pumpkin seeds, dear, they’re toasted ... Don’t get things fixed, Eve, don’t do it. If you do, another thing always breaks down.”

The apartment next door to Ensler’s own apartment is her office and the office of V-Day, the worldwide movement on behalf of women that was born, so to speak, out of the vagina of those monologues. In these seven years V-Day has raised $26 million to fight rape, incest, genital mutilation, domestic battery, and sexual battery everywhere in the world.

Five years ago, Ensler began a journal “of what my stomach was saying, and what I was saying to my stomach, back and forth. And as my work took me around the world, I would talk with women about what obsessed them.

“Out of this, I started to create monologues that fit the story I wanted to tell. And, yes, I wanted to perform this story in particular because it’s my own story, my own journey. Also because it is a play in many more ways than The Vagina Monologues.”

Director of The Good Body is Peter Askin, whose work had greatly impressed Ensler when she went to see Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

In Vagina Monologues she used to sit on a stool and read from cards. Now, on Broadway, at the Booth, no stool, no cards. As Geraldine Page once said to an intrusive civilian in another connection: That’s acting!