The Seahawk

Issue date: 2/19/09 Section: Lifestyles

"Talking about vaginas are always necessary and never wrong," Dr. Janet Ellerby pronounced to a crowd of 200, and began The Vagina Monologues, an annual benefit performance that is separate from but still linked to V-day. V-day is a global movement whose mission is to end violence against women and girls around the world through the proceeds of none other than The Vagina Monologues.

Written by award-winning playwright Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues is a poetic collection of speeches derived from real life stories all about the vagina. These monologues are very diverse and range from memoirs by a rape victim, a sex worker, to an elderly lady, a Southern black woman and many others.

Each monologue was given powerful, deliberate titles like "My Angry Vagina" and "Reclaiming Cunt." Interwoven with the monologues, however, Ensler also wrote separate pieces that are very straightforward statistics and talk of the violence happening today, such as female genital mutilation. This ties The Vagina Monologues into V-day, a charity that Ensler is also the founder of.

Each year, V-day (which is always performed on Valentine's weekend) has a different focus. The concentration this year was on the women of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In this type of environment, rape is used as a weapon of torture to disgrace women and girls both physically and psychologically. The DRC has been called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world and the widest interstate war in recent African history. Five million people have lost their lives in the ongoing war over the country's rich natural resources.

Over Valentine's weekend, the University of North Carolina Wilmington supported the fight against femicide overseas by performing The Vagina Monologues in Lumina Theatre. Directed by Amy Chapman, the monologues were reenacted in a total of three performances, one of them being a special dinner and show duo in Warwick Ballroom. Approximately 550 people attended the three performances and 10 percent of the proceeds are sent to the Congo while the rest are given evenly to the Rape Crisis Center and the Domestic Violence Center.

A diverse group of women and girls made up the cast of 16, all wearing simple, similar black, pink and red outfits. Among these women were: Kathleen Gould, who has taught in the English Department at UNCW since 1987, Dr. Janet Ellerby, who has been with The Vagina Monologues since the very first production at UNCW in 2000 and freshman Victoria Chuong. The diverse cast was also mirrored in the audience- there were a significant amount of males present in addition to the females.

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