March 25, 2003
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@ sa.ucsb.edu
Author of The Vagina Monologues Eve Ensler presents the lecture Imagining V-World at UCSB Campbell Hall
Summary Facts:
- Eve Ensler
- Imagining V-World
- Award-winning playwright of The Vagina Monologues and Necessary Targets
- Ardent crusader for human rights
- Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the College of Creative Studies
- Friday, May 2
- 8 pm / UCSB Campbell Hall
- General public $15, UCSB students $10
- Tickets/Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at 893-3535
Eve Ensler, Obie Award-winning playwright of the groundbreaking phenomenon The Vagina Monologues, will present the lecture Imagining V-World on Friday, May 2 at 8 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall. In this lecture Ensler imagines a violence-free world as the first step to achieving universal safety for women. This empowering and entertaining talk is a direct outgrowth of Ensler’s global movement “V-Day,” which is dedicated to ending violence against women. Ensler claims achieving V-World would accomplish numerous goals. According to the V-Day website (www.vday.org) when the violence stops, just some of the things women and girls will do is: keep their clitorises in Africa and Asia, vote in Kuwait, remain safe at parties on college campuses, drive cars in Saudi Arabia, walk home safely from work in Juarez, Mexico, enjoy sex, celebrate their desires, love their bodies and run the world. “She may not save the world,” Time magazine writes, “but what other playwrights even think of trying?”
Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues, translated into 22 languages, has played in theaters all over the world, including sold-out runs at both Off-Broadway’s Westside Theater and on London’s West End. Based on over 200 interviews with a diverse group of women from around the globe, the play explores the humor, power, pain, wisdom, outrage, mystery and excitement hidden in vaginas. UCSB Arts & Lectures presented The Vagina Monologues to capacity crowds in April 2002.
The play led Ensler to begin V-Day, a program that generates broader attention for the fight to stop worldwide violence against women and girls including rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation (FGM) and sexual slavery. V-Day provides funding to create and nurture innovative programs to stop the violence. In 2002, more than 800 V-Day benefit events were presented by local volunteer activists around the world, educating millions of people. In its first five years, the V-Day movement has raised over $14 million, annually granting more money to anti-violence initiatives than the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) does.
Eve Ensler’s play Necessary Targets, set in a Bosnian refugee camp, opened Off-Broadway at the Variety Arts Theater in February 2002, after a hit run at Hartford Stage. USA Today wrote, “Ensler’s straightforward intensity and delicate comic relief make [the play] absorbing and moving.” Her other plays include Conviction, Lemonade, The Depot, Floating Rhoda and the Glue Man, and Extraordinary Measures. Ensler’s upcoming new play and book, The Good Body, the result of interviews with women from different countries about how they transform their bodies to fit into their cultures’ perceptions of feminine beauty.
Ensler is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award in Playwriting, the Berrilla-Kerr Award for Playwriting, the Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, and the Jury Award for Theater at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, as well as the 2002 Amnesty International Media Spotlight Award for Leadership and The Matrix Award (2002).
In an interview Ensler confided, “I hope there’s a time when The Vagina Monologues goes out of business. That’s what I chant for every day. That one day we won’t have to be here anymore. There’ll be a day when women literally can put on the shortest skirt and tightest top and feel good and that everyone will look at them with great appreciation and great enjoyment and no one will hassle them or make them feel bad or insecure or threatened.”
Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, books by Eve Ensler will be available for purchase and signing at the event. This lecture is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures, the UCSB College of Creative Studies and the UCSB Women’s Center and is sponsored by KEYT 1250 AM.
Tickets for this special evening with Eve Ensler are $15 for the general public and $10 for UCSB students.
For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.