Unspoken moments of female adolescence and harsh realities of pressing world issues are only two of the many fluctuating components of Eve Ensler's classic play, "The Vagina Monologues."
Your Lost Flamingo Company, an Ohio University student-run theater troupe, is performing the play over the next week in Athens.
"It's a very funny show with a lot of serious moments," local play director Hannah Stanton-Gockel said. "The audience can go through extreme emotions of laughing and crying. We hope that they let themselves feel and think what they need to understand why there are such negative and positive emotions associated with women."
Lost Flamingo will perform "The Vagina Monologues" for the eighth consecutive year this Saturday at 8 p.m. in the basement of GGs Bubble Tea on South Court Street, as well as 8 p.m. Monday, Feb. 13, and Tuesday, Feb. 14, in OU's Baker Center Theatre.
Tickets are $5 at the door and the proceeds benefit My Sister's Place, a domestic violence shelter in Athens, and the V-Day Movement, a global campaign to end violence against women and girls that was started by play author Ensler.
"The Vagina Monologues," an episodic play created by Ensler in 1996, is based on a compilation of more than 200 women's personal anecdotes and interviews.
"We want this show to appeal to everyone, not just women," Stanton-Gockel said. "And we hope that the people who attend can leave with more thoughts in their head than they arrived with, or a better understanding about the variety and depth of the issues women deal with."
The show consists of 10 monologues, along with an introduction and narration to accompany each performance. The monologues are arranged in a specific order to portray chronological relevance, according to Stanton-Gockel.
"Each monologue addresses a huge variety of topics starting from 'Hair' and ending with 'Myriam,'" she said. "Basically, they begin with how you discover yourself as you become a woman and end with current world problems in Haiti and how women suffer from them."
The cast is a collection of primarily new actors to the show and will perform in the traditional style of the original play, Stanton-Gockel said.
"Some of the monologues are light and humorous, while others are dark and heavy," she said. "They all explore the progression of women everywhere and bring light to areas not often discussed openly or at all."
Performers are told to "dress vaginally," which means to wear any outfit containing black and red that exemplifies the monologue, to attract attention to the content not the costume. This is done in the hopes of conveying the proper message of the show, according to Stanton-Gockel.
"This play literally changed my life and my major," she said. "Every monologue has something special to say, and when I auditioned my freshman year of college, I got to discover who I was and transform through this play. I hope it can impact other women like it has impacted me."
