"The Cult of the Vagina: A Cuban Production of The Vagina Monologues"

In December of 2002, I traveled to Cuba as part of an arts exchange program between the Theatre Department at Ohio State University and the Ludwig Foundation for the Arts in Havana. During my time there, I had the opportunity to see a special kind of theatrical exchange when I saw a Cuban rendition of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues. In this paper, I am going to describe the theatrical exchange in the production, review style, and then the exchange over the production that I noticed between members of my group and the some of the Cubans we met. In both of these exchanges I saw religious tensions, tensions of sanctity and sacrilege. In the actual production, I saw Ensler's text shaped and staged in an entirely new way, one that left talking about the vagina in the dust, and proceeded on to experiencing it full on. While The Vagina Monologues has generally been considered a humorous, intellectual, and moving piece of feminist activism, this production was instead a humorous, emotional, and moving piece of interactive fiction. The story was one of indoctrination into a new religion: the cult of the vagina.
The second exchange I witnessed and participated in was the responses of my group, and several of the people we met and learned from in Cuba. People's reactions to the show were heated. Those who enjoyed the piece, of which I was one, felt a sense of awe and transcendence; we felt a little bit of the magic that theatre has when done well, a spiritual satisfaction. Those who did not enjoy the show felt offended, artistically and morally; they had witnessed something they found to be profane. As I describe this exchange, I hope to explore questions of how different audience members' postionalities (Cuban, American, male, female, educated, theatre trained, scholar, artist) influenced what they saw as sacred and profane.
Still young in the theatre world, The Vagina Monologues has become an important international phenomenon. Acclaimed by critics and beloved by audiences, it has become almost canonical in feminist theatre. It was created through interviews conducted by Eve Ensler, forming a multi-voiced oral history filtered through her editing and compilation. It opened in 1996 at Café in New York City's SoHo district; it moved to Off-Broadway in 1999 and enjoyed a three-year run. It has had tours all over the globe, an HBO special, and countless regional professional and amateur productions, often associated with V-Day (meaning Valentines Day, and Victory Day), a global movement to end violence against women and girls by increasing awareness and raising money for anti-violence organizations. The play's structure, a swirl of stories, rants, opinions, facts, and choral responses, defies traditional linear and episodic fictive plots, creating a play that is in some ways the essence of creative non-fiction.
The Vagina Monologues staging has been remarkably consistent. Although it has had many different casts (Ensler alone, three well-known actresses rotating and changing as their schedules allowed, one woman for each monologue, etc.) the actual execution of the play remains the same almost every time. From a design standpoint, it is generally minimalist. On a bare stage, women in black or various shades of red, sit and read, texts in hand. Occasionally, there will be curtains and boas in the background, but the play continually has neither a elaborate sets nor blocking. This, as well as making the show cheap and easy to stage, emphasizes the importance of the text, insisting that nothing is more important than hearing women's words about their vaginas. It is a talking play, a voice drama. If the audience is to engage in the production, they must listen.
This usual staging is so constant that audience members go expecting to see it done just that way. It is truly a cultural phenomenon; the experience has had such a positive effect on audiences that ensembles continue trying to recreate that exact same experience, time and time again. The consistent (perhaps repetitive) nature of the staging gives it an air of ritual and of the sacred. This means that the piece is rarely reinterpreted; rituals are not revised and revisited unless under heavy cultural duress. The Vagina Monologues, in its sacred state, has become an institution unto itself.
There are no stage directions in the published text, and thus it is difficult to say exactly why reinterpreting The Vagina Monologues in a new production has rarely been tried. One somewhat innovative production took place in the winter of 2002 in the Philippines. This production, included songs, video clips about the current problems of the sex trade there, one performer for each monologue, and several monologues performed twice, first in English, then in Tagalog. However, still, on a mostly bare stage, the monologues were read, putting emphasis on the voice in space.
On December 15, 2002, Los Monólogos de la Vagina at the Teatro Mella in Havana, Cuba, defied the usual staging and took the text in an entirely different direction. This production, directed by Jorge Ferrera and featuring four well-known Cuban television actresses, could not have been further from the usual staging of Ensler's text. In fact, it was almost unrecognizable. In many ways, the production was a perfect example of one of the teaching catchphrases that I have heard the most during my education in the arts: "Show, don't tell." The staging went completely against the emphasis on words and voice. Ensler's text was not read; it was not recited. It was dramatized-given dramatic action. It had a set and blocking. It had a fictional plot, complete with beginning, middle, and end, and consistent characters. It told the story of four women coming to understand their vaginas, sexuality, and relationships within a self-help seminar/cult setting. Nine of the monologues were cut, as well as all of the "Vagina Facts." Only four monologues from Ensler's text were used (one for each actress), along with a few of the choral pieces featuring short answers to Ensler's famous vagina questions (what would your vagina say? etc.) The monologues themselves, translated to Spanish, seemed unchanged, although they were out of their usual order, but the story required some new transitional and character dialogue.
Knowing the economic crisis and material shortages that Cuba has endured since the early nineties, called the Special Period, (kicked off by a loss of 85% of their revenue after the Soviet collapse) which the country is only now recovering from, it was difficult to tell if the absence of walls, or anything wooden or sturdy, was by choice or necessity. The entire depth of Teatro Mella's proscenium stage was used, but little of it was filled. The bare floor did not seem to be in its best state of repair or cleanliness. Down stage center were three clear, plastic blow-up chairs in neon colors. The actresses flopped, rolled, curled up, bounced, and rested in them at appropriate moments. Upstage left was a vagina-inspired coat rack; upstage right were a table and counter containing the teacher's props, such as pompoms and vagina-shaped mirrors. In the downstage right corner sat the band: a male cello player, a male pianist and keyboardist (the piano was horribly out of tune), and a female vocalist and percussionist.
The plot began by the enactment of the events described in the monologue entitled "The Vagina Workshop." The characters taking the workshop were, in order of appearance: Alicia, played by Maribel Reyes, a lanky young woman, pig-tailed and bespectacled, all in white and full of whimsical energy; Tatiana, played by Alina Rodríguez, a calm, no-nonsense woman of around thirty or forty, wearing tight jeans, a skin-tight patterned top, and a leather vest; and Dolores, played by Paula Alí, a woman crossing into the threshold of senior citizenship, with cropped red hair and wearing a purple dress with white polka-dots that would have looked matronly in the sixties. This character was clearly the least comfortable with the workshop/worship service and with her body. The workshop leader played by Carmen Daysi Rodríguez, who wore a long purple sheath-dress made of stretchy material. Her fair hair was tightly knotted on the back of her neck, giving her a more motherly and wise appearance, despite being one of the youngest in the ensemble. This character was one of the main elements that emphasized the religious air to the production. Her maternal kindness and ability to encourage and teach the other characters to take risks and grow spiritually made her seem very much a vagina guru.
After warm-ups and calisthenics, they drew their vaginas in the air (each drawing motion was punctuated by the band) and attempted to look at their vaginas (fully clothed) with vagina-shaped mirrors. The guru asked "Who here has had orgasms?"; only Tatiana raised her hand. The climactic moment of "The Vagina Workshop" monologue arrived when the guru prompted her students to find their clitorises. Alicia flew into hysterics; she could not find hers. Shrieking in terror and loss, she asked the others, and then the band if they knew where it was, and then sprinted into the audience, calling for her clitoris. These moves to break the fourth wall (addressing the band and the audience) were interesting to me. They never happened again, and were thus not well-incorporated into the show, but the use of them was so blatant, I could not help but wonder if the director was using them simply to remind theatre people that he was aware of them and could use them if he wished.
The women ran after Alicia, cutting her off and catching her after she ran out of the auditorium and back in, down the right aisle. As she knelt, weeping, the guru delivered the lesson that the clitoris was not something that could be lost; Alicia had to be her own clitoris. After the soothing lecture, Alicia rejoiced in newfound understanding and wholeness, speaking the words printed at the beginning of the monologue: "My vagina is a shell, a round pink tender shell, opening and closing, closing and opening."
Virtually every moment of this segment elicited either giggles or rowdy laughter from the audience. Alicia's youthful eagerness, Tatiana's confident strutting, and Dolores' sarcastic and awkward annoyance with the process showed a range of self-discovery within the task at hand. The ensemble used an acting style that ensured that every person in the back row of the 1000+ seat theatre saw each action and knew each emotion that was being communicated. That is, everything, every movement and sentence, was huge. At times, it seemed that the acting was simply taking the comedy to its furthest limit; vaginas are funny, they make people laugh, so why not laugh to the fullest? Other times, the women seemed so ridiculous, it seemed as though vagina workshops and any person taking a vagina workshop were not to be taken seriously. Discovering the vagina produced religious fervor, but it was the kind of fervor that people laugh at; thus it the religion depicted did not seem "legitimate" but cult-like.
The next monologue was performed by the guru, whose gorgeous blond curls were now free from their knot. She gave the monologue entitled (in English) "My Vagina Was My Village," based on an interview with a Bosnian refugee. In print, it flows from a stream-of-consciousness poem of a healthy, happy vagina, to recounting memories of multiple rapes and violent acts while in a refugee camp. In the staging of this monologue, the actress did not talk about her vagina; she physicalized and danced it. The sheer size of the acting style did not change, but was now mixed with modern dance, stylized prose and poetry with their own strange sentence structures, and a subtle musical underscoring. These elements made the acting style seem perfectly appropriate; it was still huge, but now no one was laughing. The audience was quiet and full of sympathy as she keened over her loss and writhed through pain. Her musical inflections, holding the tones spoken words longer than usual, produced a truly transcendental sound, especially when she celebrated the happier memories. I felt that this was, in the deepest sense of the word, an expression of the monologue; it proved to me that the text was truly valuable in that it could be interpreted more than one way. To me it was innovative, exciting, and fresh. Completely abandoning humor of previous scenes, this was the most serious, poignant, and beautiful moment of the evening.
Dolores gave monologue entitled "The Flood", and here, in a more naturalistic context, the acting style began to seem cartoon-like again. The character seemed positively dippy. For the first few scenes, Dolores had elicited much laughter from her physical discomfort and awkwardness. It was now clear that those were simply well-acted moments, now over. Dolores now burst all over the stage with a bright energy, using sweeping arm gestures and wide strides. Paula Alí looked energetic and graceful; however, the character Dolores seemed to have gone away, a children's storyteller in her place. The character's abrupt swing from resisting telling the story to the dazed and dreamy cooing over "Andy" was jarring and hard to believe. Perhaps this was also an attempt to embody the monologue dynamically, as the last one had been. However, it seemed far less successful, undermining the poignancy of the situation rather than heightening it. Perhaps this was because the text contains no poetic language, which lends itself better to abstraction.
The final major monologue was Tatiana's; in the English text it is entitled "The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy." Tatiana's confidence, it was revealed, stemmed from her self-knowledge and gladness in a life of pleasing women sexually. I was interested to note the openness with which the production embraced the character's sexual orientation, an act uncommon within Cuba's official history. Some titters from the audience were emitted as she proclaimed her love of women and vaginas. However, as her story developed, of how relationships and sex with men caused her to silence herself, and then how relationships and sex with women liberated her and helped her reclaim her voice, it was clear that the audience was fully sympathetic to her story and, in fact, rooting for her. This was consistent with what director Ferrera told me later, that lesbianism, while a taboo in Cuba for many years, was becoming less so, especially after the critically acclaimed film, Fresa y Chocolate loosened things up. He said that every night the audience giggled at Tatiana's lesbianism, but he was certain that the production had succeeded in creating a real character who just happened to be lesbian, and was not a cliché or a stereotype. When actress Alina Rodríguez, who played Tatiana, proudly began describing all the types of moans that women make, and then instructed the other characters in how to imitate each moan, the closest thing I could compare it to was a tent revival. The characters waved their arms around, moaning and shrieking and having, apparently, marvelously intense experiences. They seemed like ecstatic cheerleaders, cheering in tongues. Meanwhile, the audience was also wildly responsive, cheering, hooting, and laughing uproariously. They absolutely loved the show. It seemed that everyone was being converted to the cult of the vagina.
I searched to find a name for the style of this production. What was it, if it was neither cliché, nor stereotypical, nor naturalistic? It was surely not Brechtian or cold; the actresses were fully committed, playing every line and movement boldly and loudly. Then there was the use of multi-media. This production began with the live band who underscored both transitions and dramatic moments, and punctuated many physical moments of humor with percussion, quick chords on the piano, or screeches on the cello. Next, there were long video montages inserted between each major monologue. They featured women from the streets of Havana answering Ensler's usual questions. Almost all of the women interviewed were dark-skinned, perhaps attempting to make up for the fact that none of the actresses were. The sound quality, when it worked, was poor, and it was difficult to understand the answers the women gave. However, the fact that such technology was utilized for the event was notable; the scarcity of technology for the arts in Cuba is severe. The fact that resources were made available to shoot and project footage was an attestment to how important the producers felt the production was. It was also, I felt, an excellent homage to the way the text was originally created. It made the play more personal; certainly more Cuban, and it seemed very much in step with Ensler's original intent: it was real women, saying what they thought about vaginas.
The other form of rhetoric added to the production was a dancer, Sandra Ramy, who clearly represented an abstract vagina, perhaps the spirit of the vagina. She made three appearances. She was the first to enter at the beginning, wearing white swaddling clothes that bound her arms. She cautiously, fearfully, inched her way, backwards, up the steps from the audience to the stage, and then she exited in haste. Her second appearance came in the middle of the guru's monologue. The bright lighting went to an amber haze and she entered in tight white clothes that left her arms free but covered her head. She crossed in a straight line across the upstage wall, carrying a large white egg-shaped cage that surrounded her. Occasionally, she paused, crouched on the ground and flailed about as though searching or slowly struggling. After two or three crouches, she continued on until she was out of sight. Her third appearance was part of the show's final moment, which was first set up with dramatic, quiet music from the band. The four actresses became hushed, awed, and moved as they stared into the audience, acting as though they were seeing what the audience saw behind them: video footage of a birth. The moment was not discordant with Ensler's text, as the final monologue deals with just such an event. This monologue is often the only one associated with religious themes, as the vagina, something capable of sacrifice, is proclaimed wonderous and worth worshipping. The silent projection on the screen during this show was so massive, the vagina seemed truly "an archeological tunnel…a Venetian canal, a deep well" that the monologue speaks of. The vagina and the birthing act became of mythic proportions; it seemed godlike. After so much gabbing, yelling, and whooping, I felt it was a not only a tasteful choice, but an excellent way to make sure all were paying attention. It made the audience realize that while what they had witnessed up until now seemed larger than life, this was even larger.
However, after all this beautiful, universal moment had been established, the dancer reentered, bathed in a spotlight and completely naked. If the dancer was a symbol of the vagina, first entering frightened and straightjacketed, and then hooded within a cage, she was now supposed to be seen as free and triumphant. However, it was difficult for me to think of the dancer's body as anything but a very thin, pale, naked body, with breasts glinting in the light and ribs in high relief. It was possibly the only thing that could have taken my attention away from the birth footage, and it did so with a vengeance. For the first time in the show, I felt violated and annoyed. The need for one more abstract symbol in an already conclusive moment was unnecessary. The voiceless, glowing, naked female body seemed to have very little to do with embracing the vagina and everything to do with the male ideal for a final gaze at an object.
This was, in general, my only quibble with the production. I found the reinterpretation of the text exciting and refreshing. My personal aesthetic rejoices when Shakespeare and Beckett and Churchill are completely reimagined; why not The Vagina Monologues? The specific interpretation of this show seemed reasonable to me as well; in a piece all about women's bodies, why limit the performance to the voice? Why keep the performers restricted to chairs? This production sought to stimulate the audience in multiple ways, creating more intense and all-encompassing experiences. That understanding the vagina was a religious experience made perfect sense to me. If the female body were to be transubstantiated, the vagina seemed like a logical starting point to me.
While the Cuban audience that night obviously loved the production, I found I was starkly alone in my assessment once I began talking to members of my group. Almost everyone visiting from Ohio State, which comprised of graduates and undergraduates of multiple disciplines, as well as several professors, were highly offended. An undergraduate who had recently participated in a production of The Vagina Monologues, was disgusted with the production, saying she did not know what they were trying to accomplish with this "latin-over-the-top-thing." A male undergraduate said that he just plain hated it; it was stupid and he did not like the show one little bit. He laughed when I pointed out he had just referenced a character named for her vagina in a Paula Vogel play.
Also unimpressed by the production was our highly educated and theatre-trained Cuban host, Fernando Sáez. He was disgusted with the production; it violated what he considered good art and decent theatre. He had seen an American production of The Vagina Monologues during a trip to Cleveland, and reported that the text was not theatre. He told me that plays require action, and that Ensler's text contained none. Ensler's text was not a play; it was a feminist manifesto and could only be taken as one. Thus, the only way to stage this text was in the usual way: a conglomerate of voices in space. Thus, this production was a misuse of Ensler's text.
He also said that this production of Los Monólogos de la Vagina was an entirely commercial show; he felt it was artistically cheap and pandered to an uneducated, TV-oriented audience. As a theatre person, he felt insulted by the intelligence level of the show. He acknowledged that audiences generally enjoyed it, and paraphrased Peter Brook, saying that every mortal play had its mortal audience. He also said that director Ferrera was a good actor and well-known for working in experimental theatre and solo performance; he was very curious as to why Ferrera had forayed into commercial theatre.
Professors and students from the Ohio State group members felt offended by the emphasis on humor, silliness, and girlish shrieking. They felt that neither The Vagina Monologues, nor the vagina itself, could be given its full credit if not dealt with more seriously. They believed that large, loud acting styles were antithetical to the weight of the issues addressed, and they were bothered that this play had been directed by a man. The reaction that I found the most striking, which also perhaps influenced some of the others, was that Ensler's sacred text had been violated; the Cuban production had no justification for reinterpreting it. This sense of sanctity came, I believe, from the political importance of the show; it has done so much for women and feminism that it has gained a heroic, almost messianic status. However, I also heard the sentence "You've got to have a reason to change a text" frequently. This, obviously, is a worship of the text; a privileging of "the original" as somehow better and purer than all that comes after it. This is a belief I have encountered often in my education, and one that I tend to disagree with strongly. However, that particular sentence, uttered in this particular context, assumed that the Cuban artists had no reason for what they had done, no method behind the madness. Surely, this was not the case.
The program's introduction by Bárbara Rivero Sánchez says that director Ferrera has donated a structure and a theatrical essence that the text was lacking. Obviously, she means that he improved on it. When I asked Ferrera about the changing of the text, he said that the text was really only a pretext or a prologue for his production. He said that he had seen the traditional staging and he found it boring; he wanted to lighten it, lift it up, and make it more exciting. He attempted to make what he saw as a fragmented text into something more linear, while keeping a parallel discourse to that original fragmentation by adding video, music, and dance. The creation of the show actually began not with Ferrera, but with actresses Carmen Daysi Rodríguez and Maribel Reyes (categorized as "más joven" (younger) than the other two actresses in Barbara Rivero Sanchez's program notes). They decided they wanted to take a break from their television work and put on The Vagina Monologues in a live theatrical setting. It was they who chose Ferrera as director and introduced him to the script. The three of them decided to invite Paula Alí and Alina Rodríguez to join them. Ferrera said that he was interested in where the interviews in Ensler's text took place and how the text was born; he wanted a context out of which action could be built. He had each actress choose their favorite monologue, explain why it was important to them, and choose locations and settings for the monologues. From these he crafted the story of the teacher and her students.
Los Monólogos de la Vagina is certainly not the first major reworking of a previously existing text for Cuban theatre. Randy Martin writes of Teatro Buendía, a theatre company in Havana, who also had made massive cuts and additions in a previously canonical Cuban play, Lila, la mariposa (Lila, the butterfly) in order to restage it. They also added various other forms of rhetoric (dance, cabaret singing) as well as new dialogue and characters (a chorus of Yoruba goddesses), in order to get their new message across. This particular play, a sort of Cuban Streetcar Named Desire, was popular in the fifties, before the revolution. In order to claim the text as Cuban under the new consciousness of the revolution and its aesthetic, the changes were necessary. The revolution, as an ideal, as a belief system, and as a lifestyle, is very important to most Cubans.
It is also unignorable fact that in Cuba, all art must be done with the aesthetic and beliefs of the revolution in mind. This is because the censorship by the Ministry of Culture is alive and well. Castro's famous edict to artists and academia was: "Inside the revolution, everything. Outside the revolution, nothing." When I asked about how the Ministry of Culture received the piece, Ferrera replied that it had been very well received at the institutional level and that there had been no issues of censorship. When I asked Ferrera about the commercial nature of the piece, he denied thinking in categories like commercial vs. political, or mainstream vs. avant garde. He rejected the idea that his work fit into any of them. He insisted that he only wanted to put on a great show. Going from a humorous perspective was important to him, for which he had received some negative reactions from theatre critics and educated theatre people. He attributed this to a prejudice against comedy and lightheartedness. He also said that the audiences for this show were not all mainstream but different every night.
It may be of vital importance to note that feminism, as an organized movement, is not alive and well in Cuba. Castro's regime, like some other socialist regimes, has often claimed that feminism is unnecessary, that the revolution brought about equality for all, and, again, anything outside the revolution is more than suspect. Women's status, rights, and issues are, of course, an extremely complicated and multi-faceted study. Cuban female sex workers, jineteras, are world famous, and a historically national epidemic. Although the revolution claimed to have ended the practice of selling itself to foreigners, since the Special Period, the sex tourism industry boomed unlike any other, making women strange heroes, suddenly possessing the means to feed families. There are also the usual double standards for women in society, even after the revolution, such as husbands' affairs being tolerated and wives' affairs being considered outrageous, which were at the forefront of discussion in another play I saw during my time there.
But it is important to note that Cuba is dissimilar to other Spanish-speaking countries who still have heavy ties to the Catholic Church and patria postedad, a method of government by which male household heads hold all rights and property. Coco Fusco writes,
The stigmas attached to women having an active sex life before or outside marriage had diminished considerably among people of my generation. More than thirty years of free birth control, sex education, co-ed boarding schools, and a social system that reduced parental control laid the groundwork for this increased permissiveness, and set the island apart from most other Latin American countries, not to mention most Cuban exile communities.
During my time there, I saw female government workers' uniforms consisting of micro-miniskirts, and floral-pattered lace and fishnet stockings. I met women doctors, administrators, musicologists, and teachers. Ferrera told me that in Cuba, it really was not all that crazy to talk about the vagina. He insisted that Cuba was not as uptight as other countries. Although equality has not necessarily been achieved, it cannot be said that the revolution has excluded women.
It is hard to imagine The Vagina Monologues as anything other than a feminist text. However, despite Ensler's calm and unabashed use of the term in describing herself and her work (which was certainly not lost on Sáez), Los Monólogos de la Vagina seemed definitely to shy away from it. The director's brief statement quoted in the program reads that his major goal for the piece was
To express the woman-body relationship, without conceding connotations of excessive feminism, because the object is not to illustrate the battle of the sexes, but to favor the reencounter with (or rediscovery of) sexuality and pleasure, eliminating all that stands between us and our human essences.
In this quote, it is clear that feminism is defined as something that exists in opposition to men; women's self-knowledge and empowerment are something different.
Sáez believed that the piece was demeaning to women, in that the characters acted foolish, slavish, and servile. The audience, however, which indeed contained more women than men, seemed only to embrace and be energized by the characters and their behavior. The nude dancer at the end that bothered me, and the fact that the piece was directed by a man, seemed unproblematic to most of the Cubans I had conversations with about the piece. Whether the piece managed to be empowering sans feminism or was a caving into the pressures of anti-feminism may remain unresolved. What I am certain of is that the reworking and restaging of this piece done specifically for a large Cuban audience. What I would like to propose as the "reason" this ensemble had for altering the text and staging of Ensler's piece was that this was the best way to offer a feminist text to a country that officially claims no need for feminism. This happened by portraying vaginal discovery and a spiritual experience. If the church and state are separate entities, and indeed the Cuban revolution tends to be highly unreligious, by emphasizing religious themes, the political ones were downplayed. And, using the cult-like atmosphere, not an organized, recognizable religion, enabled the characters' empowerment to remain entirely personal. By centering the production on a spiritual quest, feminism receded into the background.
This is, of course, my explanation and interpretation of the piece. Uncertain how to talk about religion in Cuba, I never asked questions about it directly, and only once did I hear, unsolicited, a Cuban person use religious imagery to talk about the show. This was in my debate with the Ludwig Foundation employees about the nude appearance of the dancer. To them she was "the spirit of the vagina"; that spiritual quality made nudity all the more appropriate. My ideas of the seeking a spiritual connection which would create more powerful experiences for the audience were, at least from the few conversations I had, in anyone else's minds. Ferrera spoke of human essences, but not of spirits, souls, or deities. The general audience certainly seemed enraptured of the piece, but only as much as Star Wars fans on the opening of Episode II, or the San Francisco audience captured in Margaret Cho's I'm the One that I Want. Did they leave feeling a spiritual connection to the vagina? I have no idea. Meanwhile, everything observed and criticized by Sáez and my American traveling companions also never dealt with issues of spirituality, although the way they felt the characters were brainless and/or brainwashed did suggest a cult-like feeling. My perceptions and analyses were entirely based on my Norteamericana, feminist, graduate student's perspective, despite the fact that I was seeking to understand and respect the piece on its own terms and aesthetic. I felt that it had been written off too quickly by my traveling companions, because of their cultural arrogance, and that I could somehow not imitate such behavior. I found an explanation of what I admired and disliked in the piece through an interpretation of spirituality. What I thought I saw was a universal appeal to issues of the soul and of being spiritually alive; I thought I saw the vagina suggested as a portal through which to connect to one's inner self. I did not see it as representative of a Cuban spirituality or religion, but then, I would not be capable of reading such symbols were they put before me. Perhaps what I read into the piece was also projecting my cultural assumptions onto Cuban artists and audiences.
That people of different countries (and genders, classes, etc.) have different aesthetics is not a terribly new or insightful revelation. That theatre can be better understood and judged within context is fairly undisputed. However, it is still often ignored as international exchanges are made; whether it is in Eurocentric critics lambasting or exoticising historically colonized countries as "primitive" or "underdeveloped," or scholars dismissing various artists' work because the work does not fit the scholars' preferences or categories. I felt strongly that the group from Ohio State refused to engage Los Monólogos de la Vagina on its own terms, especially with phrases such as "this latin over-the-top-thing," which claimed to fully understand and define and judge a culture not belonging to the speaker. This did a disservice both to the piece and to their own educational experience.
A search to understand a theatrical piece within its context, within the aesthetic of its people (both audience's and producer's) often yields greater knowledge than attempting to judge it successful or unsuccessful. This is not to say that artists and scholars should not examine foreign work through their own lenses and standards; to cease doing so would be a cessation of dialogue and comparative aesthetics. Theorizing how Los Monólogos de la Vagina was a depiction self-discover as conversion, and of empowerment as vagina-worship was an interesting exercise for me; it inspired me for my own production someday. However, I learned far more by listening to the various reactions surrounding me, especially when they were the most heated, with sacred standards being violated. Trying to understand how their views gave readings of the piece different from mine, and then trying to understand how those views revealed many things about the speakers-what they considered beautiful, holy, or proper, and then what trespassed on those beliefs-was the most interesting. Combining these endeavors, I hope, has shown one example of a true international arts exchange, fully participatory, but seeking not to force or dominate.

Works Cited

Ensler, Eve. The Vagina Monologues (V-Day Edition). New York: Villard, 1998.

Ferrera, Jorge. Personal Interview. 21 December 2002.

Fusco, Coco. "Hustling for Dollars: jineteras in Cuba." The Bodies That Were Not Ours. London
and New York: Routledge, 2001. 137-153.

Martin, Randy. "Theatre After the Revolution: Refiguring the Political in Cuba and Nicaragua."
On Edge: the Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture. George Yúdice, Jean Franco, Juan Flores, editors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. 115-127.

Los Monólogos de la Vagina. Dir. Jorge Ferrera. Teatro Mella, Havana. 15 Dec. 2002.

Rudakoff, Judith. "R/Evolutionary Theatre in Contemporary Cuba: Grupo Teatro Escambray."
TDR 40:1 (Spring, 1996) 77-97.

Sáez, Fernando. Personal Interview. 18 December 2002.

Sánchez, Bárbara Rivero. "Sobre Monólogos de la Vagina." Program Notes.

The production's website is
http://www.cniae.cult.cu/monologos_dela_vagina.htm

For more information on Jorge Ferrera and his artistic projects, see http://www.cniae.cult.cu/Teatro_El_Puente.htm