Word: ensler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...gender specific. Women should be able to appreciate a testosterone-drenched Tarantino film, just as guys ought to feel O.K. sneaking a few tears at the latest Susan Sarandon sudser. But any man who braves the theater for a performance of The Vagina Monologues had better be prepared. Eve Ensler's play is a series of monologues based on interviews with real women on the subject of their most intimate body part. There are lists of answers to "empowering" questions ("If your vagina could talk, what would it say?") and harrowing first-person accounts of sexual abuse; diatribes against gynecological...
...year, is now off-Broadway, being performed solo by its author. Shorn of the somewhat overbearing I-am-woman-hear-me-roar vibes of the celebrity-studded version, its strengths as a one-woman show become apparent. Sitting on a stool with only a few lighting effects for embellishment, Ensler can soar to Rabelaisian heights (giving a bravura impression of every type of orgiastic moan) or move us with quiet compassion (a woman in her 70s describes the embarrassing episode as a teenager that all but ended her relationship with the place "down there...
...drive as an artist has always been to look at areas that are right in front of us that no one wants to look at," says Ensler, 46, who began interviewing women for The Vagina Monologues after she was "shocked" at the way a friend talked disparagingly about her own sex organ. The work has become the centerpiece of an annual effort on Valentine's Day to raise money to fight violence against women. "You know when your life mission shows up and you can no longer avoid it," she says. "I suddenly realized I had to do something major...
Life missions seem to come as easily to Ensler as gag lines to Neil Simon. She has written a one-woman show about nuclear disarmament and another based on the stories of homeless women. Her play Necessary Targets, drawn from the accounts of Bosnian rape victims, was performed in January at Washington's Kennedy Center in front of Hillary Clinton. Next year she is planning to tour in a new piece, Points of Re-Entry, about the ways women mutilate their bodies to satisfy cultural norms, from Thai women who wear heavy metal braces to elongate their necks to American...
This is Calista Flockhart the serious actress, not the flighty Ally McBeal, talking. She has appeared in stage readings of Eve Ensler's Necessary Targets, about Bosnian women refugees, and wants to tackle such roles as St. Joan, Miss Julie and Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera, the precursor to Cabaret. The hard part, of course, will be finding the time. Bash is running for just over a month, and the day after it finishes she'll be back in Los Angeles to start shooting the new season of Ally McBeal. "There's an intensity in the live experience...