Ensler finds power through pain in ‘Body of the World’
CAMBRIDGE – A succinct introduction gives the audience of “In the Body of the World” all it needs to know to begin. Playwright/actress Eve Ensler relates how she lost her personal connection to her body early in life, and tried to get it back – through anorexia, promiscuity and (this gets a laugh) performance art.
Ensler is best known as creator of “The Vagina Monologues,” a landmark art-as-activism play that told women’s stories related to their bodies. The 1996 play sparked discussion, political action, and charitable work that has raised more than $100 million to help fight violence against women and care for victims worldwide.
In the first minutes of the world-premiere play at American Repertory Theater, Ensler tells how, several years ago, she traveled to the Congo and heard agonizing stories of females from 8 to 80 who had been raped, mutilated and killed. She vowed to build the City of Joy center to help and empower survivors, and teach them to help others. But months before that center was to be finished, Ensler was diagnosed with uterine cancer, and her focus had to pivot to what was happening in her own body.
That story was told in Ensler’s 2013 “In the Body of the World” memoir (which I have not read) that A.R.T., led by artistic director Diane Paulus, commissioned Ensler to turn into a play that Paulus has directed. The writer/actress now begins by standing at the front of the stage and recounting the above basic details – and at least on Thursday night was a little stiff, clearly reciting lines. But then the action of Part 1 begins and Ensler curls on a couch as if on a hospital exam table, ready to meet the doctor she hopes will save her.
Within what seems like the same sentence, Ensler’s descriptions win a big laugh, and then bring a lump to our throats. She’s got our attention, our sympathy, and it suddenly seems like a natural conversation, a friend telling you her troubles. We are with her, and that connection never falters in what is a powerful one-woman play and an appealing, raw and fearless performance.
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In 90 minutes, Ensler shares her journey through torturous cancer treatments; through facing traumas of her earlier life, including her broken family; through fear, anger and questions about which of her many mistakes brought her this close to death. She also connects what is happening inside her body to the destruction happening to the Earth, telling how, in her post-operative despair after several of her organs were removed, she couldn’t stop watching video footage of oil pouring into the sea after the BP spill disaster.
“Who wants to live,” she asks, “in a world where we made the ocean bleed?”
Ensler details a lot of personal pain – how “stupid” was her father’s favorite word for her, her insecurities, her sexual and drug abuse – and re-creates heartbreaking scenes from her life, including days of vomiting after her body rejects treatment and a visit to the also-ill mother who was always too remote to tend to her children’s woes. It’s enough that one wonders how Ensler can bear to relive it all performance after performance – whether this show must be shattering, or cathartic, or both.
But as devastating as much of her story sounds, Ensler and Paulus are careful to share many funny, revelatory, love-filled and joyous moments, too – as Ensler notes there is and there needs to be found in anyone’s awful situations in life. Ensler’s comic timing is spot-on, and she and Paulus provide startlingly swift and abrupt juxtapositions of light and dark – a laugh-out-loud scene about flatulence vs. a horrific story of abuse; a dance brought on by the mesmerizing beauty of a tree vs. fear of death; paralyzing anxiety over chemotherapy vs. a friend/therapist’s words completely changing her perspective; a scene of heart-wrenching tenderness vs. gut-wrenching pain.
To relate all this, Ensler converts a sofa, a chair and some pillows into various locations (and people) and changes costumes a few times on stage. What transforms the telling, though, are Finn Ross’ projections on a giant screen behind her that – combined with M.L. Dogg’s sound design and Jen Schriever’s lighting – beautifully take us to the Congo, to an ocean, to a hospital, inside a rainstorm and inside Ensler’s mind.
As emotionally tough as much of the “In the Body of the World” journey is, Ensler’s latest and so-personal activism art ends on notes of hope that go beyond the fact that she is standing there able to tell the story of her near-death. In her own life and for the lives of so many women, especially in the Congo, she has turned pain into power. And to add to that uplift, Paulus and set designer Myung Hee Cho leave us at the end with a startling visual image that, for many connected reasons, it will be difficult to forget.
In a program note, Paulus mentions that her artistic-director goal is to extend a theatrical experience beyond the stage, and clearly that has been Ensler’s aim through her career. So following each performance, there is an “Act II” discussion with a changing list of activists, authors, medical professionals and scholars. Worth a listen.
What: “In the Body of the World”
Written and performed by: Eve Ensler
When: through May 29
Where: Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle St., Cambridge
Tickets: $25-$75
Reservations: 617-547-8300 or americanrepertorytheater.org