Seven Oaks Magazine.

As the stage lights dimmed on an exultant Eve Ensler at the end of The Good Body and the audience rose to their feet in appreciation for this one-woman show written and performed by Ensler herself, I realized that my presumptions about the play – prompted by a quick skim through the program booklet prior to the show – had been, on a general level, confirmed.

The program booklet begins with an excerpt from the introduction of Ensler’s play; its pull quote reads as follows: “Then be bold and love your body. Stop fixing it. It was never broken.” Would this play turn out to be a typical feminist treatment of the sexist beauty ideologies which pervade women’s every day lives? Would liberal feminist philosophies of self-empowerment and self-love work as thematic weaves throughout the narrative? The answer to both questions, I later found out, was an emphatic “Yes.”

As a feminist who is constantly critical of theories which are asymmetrically focused on the self – theories which, for example, hinge upon the idea that we can emancipate ourselves from the malevolent impacts of parochial beauty constructions by tapping into our inner faculties for healing and self-acceptance – I still found Ensler’s play to be delightfully well-written, even though it offers nothing earth-shattering, nor movement-altering for feminists involved in the struggle to dismantle dominant beauty ideologies.

According to Ensler in the voiceover at the commencement of the play, women are considered “good” if and only if they abide by the social customs imposed upon them by a sexist society. She points to the continually relevant example of the beauty-related maintenance procedures that have been ritualized and regimented into women’s daily routines, making women their own worst critics. In response to this cultural creation of female “goodness”, she declares unabashedly that she, in fact, has never been “good.”

And thank goodness for that intrepid declaration. With a strong and charismatic stage presence; with a script that is at once vulnerable, comical, and heartbreaking; with the execution of a virtually flawless performance (save for a few minor fumbles and a questionable Puerto Rican accent), Ensler, it seemed, could do no wrong with the multi-generational, multi-ethnic audience, who loved her from beginning to end. As someone who gripes about the state of her stomach and whose body shape and size are much more representative of the body types of most women living in North America, Ensler is someone we enjoy watching because her experiences are relatable and her witty monologue is accessible. For those of us who are irate at the ridiculous restrictions imposed by the low carbohydrate diet regimen – because Eve loves her bread too, dammit! – Ensler speaks our cultural language.

The woman who wrote the courageous play that galvanized women around the world to embrace their vaginas and their sexual desires – in whatever unexpected and socially transgressive forms they may appear – could do no wrong at Sunday afternoon’s performance here in Vancouver. The shock-and-awe material of The Vagina Monologues, however, is not a common quality in this work, causing my mild disappointment. The Good Body centres on Ensler’s personal exploration into the cringe-inducing, harmful, and extremist measures many women take in order to be “beautiful”, as well as her own protests with what aging has done to her stomach. She is amazed at the amount of time she invests into worrying and working on this particular body part, ruminating at the irony of her preoccupation since she is so vocally and politically feminist. What if, she laments, women re-directed all the energy they normally fixate on their bodies into saving the world instead?

During this journey, she meets women around the world who all have grievances with their own bodies, such as Helen Gurley Brown, the outlandish founder and former editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine who talks about the painstaking measures she takes to maintain her diminutive figure, as well as renowned Italian actress Isabella Rosellini who reflects on the rampant sexism and ageism that renders the entertainment and modeling industries so toxic. When she performs the part of a woman who surgically tightens her vagina to please her partner, the monologue effectively incites audience pathos and empathy, particularly when the character reflects upon the pain which accompanies intercourse and the total loss of sexual desire that haunts her post-surgery life.

Equally heartrending are sections when Ensler evokes memories of being the black sheep in her family: her mother and father had film star good looks in their primes, leading Eve to speculate incredulously on how she could possibly be their biological daughter. Linking her obsession with achieving a toned figure with her yearning to feel accepted and loved by her parents – “maybe they would love me more if there were less of me” – I was reminded of some of my friends who, under the microscopic and authoritarian gaze of their family members, have developed an inescapable and all-consuming self-loathing, engaging in cyclical, dangerous dieting practices in order to gain their acceptance at last. Human relationships, with an especial emphasis on relationships with parents, play a pivotal role in the play, illustrating the power our loved ones have in both enhancing or degrading our corporeal, embodied experiences.

The stage, consisting of props which are meant to replicate the arrangement of a Hollywood photo shoot, is effective in conveying our uncritical loyalty to the popular media’s representations of beauty idealism. But when Ensler’s play takes her to Africa (where an African woman offers her a much more democratic perspective on beauty) and to Afghanistan (where she finally finds peace with her body) the props seem out-of-place and awfully contrived.

Ensler is unrepentant – and rightfully so – in her scathing critique of the sexist cultural milieu in which women pathologize their bodies, and she embarks upon an arduous search into the ways in which these women ‘remedy’ the body part(s) which ail them. However, save for her reference to Iranian women who get nose jobs in order to look less “Iranian”, Ensler’s play is surprisingly mute on the imperial and colonial reach of Western beauty ideals which permeate many parts of the world. In Southeast Asia, for instance, many women are undergoing the surgical knife in order to emulate white facial features. I wondered why this compelling and altogether fitting example never made it into this one-woman show.

Her portrayal of the African woman, as well, demonstrates an oversight of current global realities. She is one of the only characters in the play who does not strive manically for body perfection like the other characters do, instead advising Ensler to appreciate different forms of beauty. The dialogue of this character potentially implies, of course, that African culture is insular and remains untouched by external forces of global capitalism. In the fallout of colonization and in processes of current day cultural colonization in Africa, it is not difficult to find women on the continent – particularly in emerging and established urban centres which emulate Western development models – who are striving for whiteness through skin bleaching methods or who, at the very least, deeply subscribe to beauty ideologies as they operate along structures of racial hierarchy.

In addition to not including an investigation into the racialization of beauty norms, Ensler does not address the remarkable role that class plays in accessing “beauty”: evidently, personal trainers, plastic surgery, annual passes to the gym, and fitness boot camps are luxuries only easily affordable for middle and upper class constituencies.

It is in the war-ravaged country of Afghanistan that Ensler achieves personal revelation in her lifelong battle with her body, pledging her solidarity – and a generous helping of full fat ice cream which she must enjoy out of eyesight and earshot of the Taliban – with all of the women she has met on her journey. Ice cream, then, is latched to the notion of women’s liberation – whether in Kabul or New York, women should have the right to savor this dessert free of guilt and fear of retribution, albeit the oppressive circumstances which create these undesirable feelings are tremendously distinct in both locations. Ensler successfully pulls together the disparate stories of all of the women she portrays in The Good Body in this effective conclusion, adroitly constructing a theatrical venue for women’s narratives from various cultural, geographical, and political settings to intersect and entailing the possibility of a global feminist movement which takes all of these differences into account.

While the play offered nothing novel in the tradition of feminist empowerment narratives, Ensler’s new work is perhaps most politically and socially relevant when she invokes what women should really be doing instead of continuing deeply disturbing patterns of self policing and self-loathing. While we are inside looking with dissatisfaction at our reflections in the mirror, the world continues to happen: the troops are not yet home from Iraq, our civil liberties are being pilfered from underneath us, and torture is being used as a legitimate form of interrogation by the most powerful nation on earth. If only Ensler had managed to bridge her personal navigation through the world of tummy tucks, vaginal tightening, and botox incisions with a political prescription to democratize notions of beauty, this feminist reviewer would have been entirely smitten.

While she states in the introduction that we need to stop fixing our bodies because they were never broken, perhaps she could have also expressly stated that it was never women’s bodies that needed to be fixed; it is the world, in fact, that needs our drastic renovation. Her inspiring performance, however, is worth the trip to the theatre alone. In a world where lollipop figures of white actresses in Hollywood are considered culturally palatable internationally, The Good Body was written for the purposes of making women feel positive about and comfortable with themselves again. With her impenitent and confident onstage presence, many audience members may also experience an elevation in self-esteem after watching the show – and that’s no trivial feat either.