For the Women of The Vagina Monologues, Camel City Playhouse 2026
Finding myself rehearsing again for The Vagina Monologues carried me back to the last time I performed in it, only weeks before the pandemic shutdown. As I stood on stage, saying, “I was there in the room,” I had no idea that our lives were about to be confined to rooms—for maddening months on end.
While we sheltered in place—on the edge of the apocalypse, it seemed—the playwright V, formerly known as Eve Ensler, spoke with writer Jemimah Steinfeld about a new version of her play Chamomile Tea, which depicts two women living behind masks as the result of nuclear fallout. V said to Steinfeld:
“‘Will you go out and risk getting ill? Will you live with freedom and potentially die [going outside] or will you live inside a gas mask where you can no longer eat, talk, or feel? What is it like living without touch, without connection to people, without community?’” (par. 6).
Although she was speaking of the imagined nuclear fallout of her Reagan-era play, V could have been referring to her own experience then, in 2020, or to ours. (Though we weren’t wearing gas masks, we were masked.)]
Minus the masks, we returned to that isolation in late January and early February when back-to-back stormageddons froze us in our tracks.
For many of us, driving to rehearsal meant long stretches on dark roads where we didn’t know what hazards might lie ahead. Those long stretches became less difficult when I reminded myself that those journeys were a metaphor. Such fear of the unknown is a daily part of the lives of the women V has honored with her monologues.
As I write these words, I can hear running water: the sound of the last remnants of the storms we have weathered. Women weather storms. V has documented them. And now we bring them to the stage.*
In sisterhood, Jane Lucas
Pussycat Narrator
I am grateful for the opportunity to perform by your side, and I hope we’ll have the chance to work together again.
Steinfeld Jemimah. “Masking the Truth: The Writer of the Vagina Monologues (Formerly Known as Eve Ensler) Speaks to Index About Attacks on the Truth. Plus a New Version of Her Play About Living in a Nuclear Wasteland.” Index on Censorship, vol. 49, no. 2, 2020, pp. 76–81, https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0306422020935356.
*And, fortunately, we won’t have to perform as an Ice Capades troupe.
Jane Lucas 