"I was there in the room. I remember."

             


Eve Ensler is active. The Vagina Monologues are active.  They tell stories about women doing, women seeking out, women redeeming, women finding.  Women finding their voices.

Eve Ensler asks questions. The Vagina Monologues ask questions.  They solicit reactions from women, responses from women, stories from women. Voices awakening from within women.

Action and reaction are among the most commonly occurring and most frequently discussed themes in Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues.  Throughout the stories of empowerment, tragedy, victory and desolation, Ensler is actively engaging her audience.  She pushes them out of their comfort zone by saying words and telling stories of events and places that are considered illicit, taboo, meant to be hidden.  She seeks reactions by calmly stating the outrageous.  She makes her audience talk and laugh and cry and feel angry.  She insists that her audience start asking why women don’t do something different, why we accept so easily what we are taught is acceptable. She commands. “You cannot love a vagina unless you love hair” (9).  She gets women to talk. “My vagina’s angry… My vagina’s furious and it needs to talk.  It needs to talk about this shit.  It needs to talk to you. I mean, what’s the deal? (69).”

Then comes “I Was There in the Room.”  Amidst the undulations of emotions and reactions, through the emotional fatigue from active reading, listening, and feeling, there is something quiet.  Ensler is in a place in which events are happening not because she was asking questions in an interview or performing to instigate audience response, but because a new life has been created—the life of her granddaughter, Colette.  During the child’s birth, Ensler was just… there.

And yet, this monologue is still as powerful as the others.  Although it represents, in many ways, a different aspect of femininity, it still achieves Ensler’s goal of personifying the vagina.  This time, however, the vagina is not a place to be explored or a place that has been violated.  It is a heart.  It is an organ capable of letting out just as much as it is of letting in.  It has the capacity for love, and for sacrifice. It is a place that is capable of providing insight.

Maybe, then, despite its more passive tone, “I Was There in the Room” is not really saying anything that different…