This past weekend, I was in a Yale production of Eve Ensler’s revolutionary play The Vagina Monologues. (I’m pictured at left, with cast mate Jenny Williams.) We staged the show as part of V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women.

The “V” in V-Day stands for Vagina, Victory, and Valentine. The movement has proclaimed Valentine’s Day “V-Day” while violence against women continues to exist. Until all women can live without fear of abuse, rape, genital mutilation, and various other threats, V-Day vows to raise awareness and money to prevent these offences through staging benefit productions of The Vagina Monologues.

Written in 1996 after a series of interviews with over 200 women, The Vagina Monologues began as a celebration of female sexuality. As Ensler continued her interviews after the first draft of the play was performed, however, she kept writing. She added monologues highlighting various forms of violence inflicted upon women all over the world. She investigated female genital mutilation, acid burning, domestic abuse, incest, and rape. The play soon became a collage of monologues and facts characterizing the vagina as a place of power, joy, violation, and despair.

I didn’t know any of this until two weeks ago. I’d heard of The Vagina Monologues; I was always embarrassed by what I assumed was its sexual exhibitionism. But when I received a Yale Women’s Center e-mail advertising auditions for the Monologues, I found myself signing up. Though I had done some theater in high school, I was too intimidated to pursue it in college. But when I opened the e-mail, it was late, I was delirious from mid-terms, and for some unknown reason I decided auditioning with a monologue recounting one woman’s search for her clitoris would be a gentle way to ease back into acting.

I was shocked when I saw the cast list. It was one thing to fake an orgasm in front of the student director, but to stand before my friends and classmates and gab about my vagina? I showed up to the first rehearsal terrified. The four other cast members were all spectacularly talented and experienced freshmen. Fantastic. Our director, Martine Forneret (pictured), divided the monologues amongst us, and I was soon playing a 72-year-old Southern virgin.

(Pictured: Cast members Claire Gordon and Liba Vaynberg.)

With only a week to rehearse, we decided to do a reading of the show rather than a full staging. We set up stools and used note cards on stage to remember our lines. Though V-Day technically coincides with Valentine’s Day, any performance of the Monologues up until early March is considered a part of the movement.

I practiced often in my thin-walled dorm room, eternally grateful that I was not assigned the female dominatrix monologue which ends with a series of 20 different orgasmic moans. (Krystal Flores, who played this role, is pictured.) The more time I invested, the more my thoughts revolved around vaginas. Not always in a good way. I learned that female genital mutilation is inflicted on over three million girls and young women each year. That more than 470 girls have been kidnapped and murdered, mutilated, or raped outside of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico within the past 14 years.

p(clear). Each year V-Day focuses on a different issue affecting women across the world. This year, it spotlighted women in conflict zones. One of my monologues explained this issue. I asked the audience questions: “How do you make war matter? How do you make destruction matter? How do you make people’s suffering thousands of miles away matter?”

When the other actors and I spoke to audience members after the show, we realized that even if only for a night, we had done just that: made war, destruction, and other people’s suffering matter. Through talking about vaginas, we had jolted both ourselves and our audience into awareness—the very mission of V-Day.