All About Eve.

• Author: Lewis, Andrea

The word "vagina" has never had it so good, thanks to Eve Ensler. Her Vagina Monologues has evolved from a unique piece of theatrical entertainment into a call to action to end violence against women.

The genesis of the work "was kind of a gorgeous accident," Ensler tells me during a recent phone interview. "I was having a conversation with this woman about menopause, and we stumbled on the subject of her vagina. She started saying things about her vagina that really surprised me--that she had enormous contempt for it, and it was all dried up and finished and done. She was a very forward-thinking woman and a feminist, and I thought, `Wow! How odd. Is this what women think about their vaginas?'"

Ensler's curiosity was piqued. "I would just kind of casually say to friends in passing: `What do you think about your vagina?' Everything that every woman said was so utterly startling and amazing that I kept going. Then one woman would say, `Oh, you really should talk to my friend. She has this incredible story.' And before I knew it, I was down the vagina trail, and I haven't really gotten off it."

After conducting more than 200 interviews, Ensler put together the script for her original one-woman show, which was recently reprised in San Francisco and other select cities.

"Sometimes pieces reveal themselves to you," Ensler says of her writing process. "Sometimes it's a single line, a thought, a character. Like `The Flood,' the story of the woman who had the one kind of bad, humiliating sexual experience, and then she never has sex again. After I interviewed that woman, it haunted me: her way of telling it, the mundaneness of the fact, the ordinariness of the woman who had one bad experience and then never had sex for the rest of her life. I heard that a lot from older women. In those times, people didn't talk about sex. So many women had these very, very absent lives--sex was absent."

The presentation of the stage version of The Vagina Monologues couldn't be simpler: The immaculately dressed Ensler sits on a stool and talks to the audience about vaginas--and nothing but vaginas: "In Great Neck, they call it a `pussycat.' ... In Westchester, they call it a `pooki.' ... A `Mimi' in Miami, `split knish' in Philadelphia, and `schmende' in the Bronx."

There is vagina humor: "Let's just start with the word `vagina.' It sounds like an infection at best, maybe a medical instrument: `Hurry, nurse, bring the vagina.'"

But there are also disturbing facts...