Given the strides that women have made as political leaders across the globe and the possibility that one or more females might head up our presidential ballot in 2008, who would think that other members of the sex would be hiring plastic surgeons to whittle their feet to fit Manolo Blahniks? Or that some of the sisterhood in Los Angeles would be undergoing tightening procedures at a “vaginal rejuvenation center”? These true stories and more form the text of Eve Ensler’s solo play The Good Body , which opens at the Cutler Majestic Theatre March 21 as part of a 14-city national tour following a three-month Broadway run.
The show is based on the universal truths that nearly all women carry on a hate affair with one or another of their body parts and that they spend untold amounts of time and money on making the offenders better. “What gets me,” Ensler says, “is the energy we’re spending to fix ourselves while we are living in the most dangerous time on earth — ever.”
A revolutionary who allowed women the world over to chant the V-word at performances of The Vagina Monologues , Ensler now moves her gaze up her body to focus on a lifelong disdain for her belly in The Good Body . She believes that the patriarchal society has foisted the trio of thinness, blondeness, and obedience on women to keep them quiet and distract them from marching against violence, abuse, and the waging of war. “I think the consumer-based culture is getting more insidious every day. It’s upping the propaganda. You have to keep people addicted, keep making them hate their own bodies.”
The characters Ensler becomes in The Good Body are based on interviews that range from her chats with celebrities like Helen Gurley Brown and Isabella Rossellini to talks with an African-American teenager enraged at the “skinny bitches” at the fat camp she’s attending, a supermodel in Rio who’s having every lump and limb either surgically reconstructed or liposuctioned, and finally, in contrast, a beautiful African Masai woman who loves her body. The attitudes expressed are alternately hilarious and shocking, and Ensler adds, “There’s nothing I didn’t hear.” The segments about Brown and Rossellini are delivered verbatim and with visual elements that include Brown’s 200 push-ups a day, at age 80, to keep her weight at 90 pounds.
Post-performance talkbacks are scheduled with Ensler and local talking heads during the show’s seven-performance run. Pulitzer-winning columnist Ellen Goodman and her daughter Katie (who’s in town with Broad Comedy at Stuart Street Playhouse) appear on opening night; educator Carol Gilligan speaks on March 25. “One piece of this story,” Goodman says, “resonates across the age spectrum. Instead of whatever we thought would come from the feminist movement in terms of self-acceptance, for younger women there are more and more body parts to be perfected.”
THE GOOD BODY | March 21-26 | Cutler Majestic Theatre, 219 Tremont St, Boston | $35-$65 | 800.233.3123 or www.maj.org
