IUSB Michiana Monologues to present a rich range of women's stories in Elkhart & Goshen

Finale by De Bryant, Professor of Psychology IUSB

February has been monologue month ever since Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues launched its campaign for female empowerment in 1998. Ensler's project has grown massively in the past ten years, becoming an international fundraising effort to stop violence against women in countries far and wide. The first performance was a packed show in New York that raised $250,000 for local anti-violence groups, performed by such luminaries as Margaret Cho, Glenn Close, Whoopie Goldberg, Marisa Tomei and Winona Ryder.  After this initial success, the near-viral spread of the Monologues to college campuses and local groups has produced a more inclusive performance form whose fundraising muscle is the result of often-untapped forms of local promotion and networking.

Melany Gabris performs "Remote Control"

The Michiana Monologues, performed this past weekend at Indiana University, South Bend, is one such local spinoff, taking its format and goals from Ensler, but investing in specific stories about women from this area.  In its third year, The Michiana Monologues are a compelling collection of stories about female “Love, Joy… and Pain” (as this year's title has it), performed by a compelling collection of women from South Bend, Mishawaka and Elkhart.  These include students from IUSB, Goshen and other local schools, but also a professional doula, a Red Cross worker, a paralegal, a massage therapist, a minister and an interior designer.  They are married women and single moms, lesbians and divinity students. Together they make up a chorus of speakers that seems at once local and universal.  The monologues, read rather than memorized, describe specific women’s experiences, and they are written by women from the community, most of whom submitted them anonymously through the Michiana Monologues web site.  This anonymity is probably the most important thing to understand about the Michiana Monologues phenomenon, as well as the related fact that the texts read on stage have not been written by the women who are reading them.  This situation, announced at the beginning of every performance, is a signal for the audience that these stories of pleasure and sexual confusion, romantic expectation and disappointment could be anyone's stories.  They are Everywoman's stories.

This type of strategy has a precedent in the days of feminist consciousness-raising, when stories of individual experience became politicized, in other words understood as shared experience, through the process of speaking them aloud.  Consciousness raising, the grassroots political tool used by small groups in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, was a particularly effective tool for shining a clarifying light on the secret humiliations of women, who had come to be isolated from each other as self-imposed prisoners of the “feminine mystique,” to quote Betty Friedan’s bestselling book title of 1963.  Similarly, the Monologues and other similar confessional performances are intended to address the isolating effect of traditional gender roles by putting painful experiences out in the open, showing that they are, in fact, shared, and thereby rendering them less scary.  It’s clear from having watched quite a few of these performances in different contexts that, while some men may inevitably feel excluded by their content, the experience of watching and participating can be a powerful tool for creating community among women based on shared stories of joy and pain, and for raising their often battered self-esteem.

On Sunday night, we were very content to watch as twenty-eight theater amateurs with varying degrees of enthusiasm and commitment spoke the lines they had chosen or had been given by the director, the flamboyant and lovely spoken word artist, Zorina Exie Jerome (see, for example, www.cdbaby.com/Artist/Zorina).  In general, the direction is clear and unimpeeded by unnecessary embellishment.  However, the fact that this type of performance is generally committed to never turning away anyone from auditions - certainly a worthy democratic goal in itself - can occasionally result in less-than-inspiring acting.  In this case, these disappointing moments are fleeting, thanks to the short length of each monologue and to the fact that there is plenty of talent to behold on stage.  Notable among the cast is: Sherry L. Smith, who gives a superb performance of comic outrage in a piece called “It’s a Weave; Get over It!"; Judy Shroyer, who lends her great sense of timing and humor to “16W,” a piece about dress size; Trisha Miller, whose reappearances in a series of “Haikus for Big Boobs” is pleasantly ironic; Melanie Gabris in a fabulous piece about the strange imaginings of a sexual innocent; and Lesley Craft, whose knowing smile in "Kegel Me Baby" brought down the house.  Bet you can’t guess what I’m doing right now, she said, hilariously, eyes turned somehow inward as she stood before the crowd, not-so-secretly exercizing her so-called "pelvic floor."