THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES

An adaptation of performance pieces from Ensler's Obie Award–winning one-woman show, inspired by several hundred interviews the playwright had with women about their genitals.

The work, Ensler says, is intended to free women from the shame many have been taught to feel regarding their vaginas and, by extension, their sexuality. It's crucial, she says, "for women to tell their stories, to share them with other people....Our survival as women depends on this dialogue.'' The monologues (which range from a painful account of rape to a droll record of a woman learning to really see her vagina for the first time, in a "vagina workshop'') vary greatly in effect, and other portions of the work (which run from character monologues to interpolations by Ensler to lists drawn from her questions to women, such as, "What does a vagina smell like?'') are fragmentary.

You might have to be a woman to appreciate the humor and poignancy here, but women will.