All About Eve.

The word "vagina" has never had it so good, thanks to Eve Ensler. Her Vagina Monologues has evolved from a unique piece of theatrical entertainment into a call to action to end violence against women.

The genesis of the work "was kind of a gorgeous accident," Ensler tells me during a recent phone interview. "I was having a conversation with this woman about menopause, and we stumbled on the subject of her vagina. She started saying things about her vagina that really surprised me--that she had enormous contempt for it, and it was all dried up and finished and done. She was a very forward-thinking woman and a feminist, and I thought, `Wow! How odd. Is this what women think about their vaginas?'"

Ensler's curiosity was piqued. "I would just kind of casually say to friends in passing: `What do you think about your vagina?' Everything that every woman said was so utterly startling and amazing that I kept going. Then one woman would say, `Oh, you really should talk to my friend. She has this incredible story.' And before I knew it, I was down the vagina trail, and I haven't really gotten off it."

After conducting more than 200 interviews, Ensler put together the script for her original one-woman show, which was recently reprised in San Francisco and other select cities.

"Sometimes pieces reveal themselves to you," Ensler says of her writing process. "Sometimes it's a single line, a thought, a character. Like `The Flood,' the story of the woman who had the one kind of bad, humiliating sexual experience, and then she never has sex again. After I interviewed that woman, it haunted me: her way of telling it, the mundaneness of the fact, the ordinariness of the woman who had one bad experience and then never had sex for the rest of her life. I heard that a lot from older women. In those times, people didn't talk about sex. So many women had these very, very absent lives--sex was absent."

The presentation of the stage version of The Vagina Monologues couldn't be simpler: The immaculately dressed Ensler sits on a stool and talks to the audience about vaginas--and nothing but vaginas: "In Great Neck, they call it a `pussycat.' ... In Westchester, they call it a `pooki.' ... A `Mimi' in Miami, `split knish' in Philadelphia, and `schmende' in the Bronx."

There is vagina humor: "Let's just start with the word `vagina.' It sounds like an infection at best, maybe a medical instrument: `Hurry, nurse, bring the vagina.'"

But there are also disturbing facts ("In the United States, the last recorded clitoridectomy for curing masturbation was performed in 1948--on a five-year-old girl") and haunting stories.

Ensler wrote the monologue "My Vagina Was My Village" after she spent two months interviewing Bosnian women refugees about their lives in rape camps. "When I returned to New York after my first trip, I was in a state of outrage," Ensler says in the V-Day Edition of The Vagina Monologues (Villard, 2000). "Outraged that 20,000 to 70,000 women were being raped in the middle of Europe in 1993, as a systematic tactic of war, and no one was doing anything to stop it."

Monologues takes audiences through an array of women's sexual emotions and provokes reactions that range from laughter to stunned silence. There are angry vaginas and vaginas dressed in silk stockings.

Ensler's warm and relaxed conversational style is readily apparent during interviews and performances. No doubt that goes a long way in her efforts to get women to open up and talk about their bodies--and particularly their genitals.

"I come from the `down there' generation," writes Gloria Steinem in the foreword of the new edition. "Those were the words--spoken rarely and in a hushed voice--that the women in my family used to refer to all female genitalia, internal or external."

The curtain went up on the first performances of The Vagina Monologues in 1997, and the off-Broadway show quickly began to garner attention and praise. As acclaim for the theatrical piece grew, so did the political impact of the work. "In 1998, we did something called V-Day," Ensler tells me. "V-Day is essentially a global movement to end violence toward women, and it was launched with a huge, wonderful performance by all these great actors: Whoopi [Goldberg], Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, Lily Tomlin. It was an extraordinary event, which really raised a lot of money and consciousness. That inaugurated the idea of these other women doing the piece." The diverse and growing list of alumni performers includes Rita Moreno, Alanis Morissette, Claire Danes, Erica Jong, Brooke Shields, and Marlo Thomas ("`That Girl Goes Down There' was one of my favorite headlines," says Ensler with a chuckle). And on February 10 at Madison Square Garden, a blow-out benefit featured performances by Queen Latifah, Rosie Perez, Pratibha Parma, and many others.

The V-Day movement has spread beyond the professional stage to local communities around the globe. More than 225 college campuses in the United States have mounted performances of The Vagina Monologues, usually around Valentine's Day.

The work has been a transformative experience for many who have seen, produced, or performed it. It "will be the experience that I remember most from my college career," said Danielle, a student at Colorado State University, who is quoted in the current edition. "It reinforced my belief in the power of community, especially a strong community of women."

Ensler consciously combines art with activism. "For a long time, I really struggled with those two forces in my life," she says. "Fortunately, I bless the great goddesses that it's come together and I've found a way to manifest both those things at the same time."

Some of the raw, sexual honesty of The Vagina Monologues has been criticized, but Ensler defends her presentation. "One of the things I feel is that if you're truly going to interview people, then you really need to tell their stories, and people's stories are complicated," she says. "They are not always `politically correct,' and as much as I'm an activist, I'm also a storyteller and hopefully a truth-teller."

Ensler mentions a woman she met in a homeless shelter. "Her story was really extraordinary in that she'd been raped by her father's best friend, she'd been brutalized by this little boy, she'd had all kinds of terrible experiences with her vagina," Ensler says. "And then when she was thirteen, this older woman, who was twenty-four, seduced her. And from her words, not mine, she described that as the saving experience of her life. That it healed her and brought her into her sexuality and gave her a way of looking at her life and her vagina that literally saved her. Now, I had all kinds of questions and issues about that, but that's her story. She was consenting, she agreed, nothing was against her will, and yes, she was thirteen or fourteen when it happened.

But on the other hand, I'm not going to take her will away from her, either. If she reports that the experience was a loving, tender one, who am I to doubt that?"

The Vagina Monologues has taken on a life of its own, and it has already been performed in South America, the Middle East, and more than a dozen African countries.

Meanwhile, her creative vision is expanding beyond the pelvic region. Necessary Targets: A Story of Women and War, her first play since The Vagina Monologues, has been performed at the National Theater in Sarajevo and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

And she has a new one-woman show, The Good Body, which she hopes will hit the mainstream in the fall. "I went around the world for four months and interviewed women in fourteen different countries for this new project," she says. "It was unbelievably interesting, and very disturbing, and in some cases, very exciting." Continuing the focus on women's self-image, The Good Body addresses the ways women around the world feel compelled to conform to society's standard of beauty.

"After I finished The Vagina Monologues, my self-hatred moved into my stomach," she confesses. "And I thought, `Oh, no! Now I'm obsessed with my stomach!' I started thinking, `Why are we so obsessed with our bodies?' So that has begun this new adventure."