With violence against women ever present in Central Alberta and around the world, it’s high time for another local presentation of the highly entertaining The Vagina Monologues.
The Central Alberta Aids Network is staging the outrageously funny, devastatingly dramatic Eve Ensler production for the fourth year running on Friday and Saturday, Feb. 12 and 13, at the Red Deer Memorial Centre.
Producing this annual reminder of the need for female empowerment is important “because violence against women, nationally and internationally, has never gone away,” said Jennifer Vanderschaeghe, the network’s executive director.
The effects of gender-based violence are felt in Central Alberta, where demand for beds at the women’s shelter have increased.
Two women were murdered in Central Alberta last year, one in Red Deer and the other in Delburne.
Two men were charged in the separate cases.
Further afield in Africa and the Middle East, women’s rights abuses are rampant, according to the group Human Rights Watch.
And Haiti, known to have one of the worst records of anti-female violence in the world, just lost three important women’s rights supporters in the earthquake — including Ministry for Women Chief-of-Staff Myrian Merlet, who first brought The Vagina Monologues to Port Au Prince.
That the late Merlet imported The Vagina Monologues as a way of pushing her culture towards a greater appreciation for females, serves as an endorsement of the stage production’s power to foster acceptance and understanding through comedy and searing drama.
Vanderschaeghe said this year’s Monologues features two new speeches, and both fall into the dramatic category.
One is about a young Congalese girl who is captured and enslaved as an older man’s “wife” while visiting a friend in another community. The teenager returns to her village two years later bearing a baby — and a shameful stigma.
Vanderschaeghe notes rape, and pimping and prostitution, contribute to higher rates of HIV infection in the world. The other monologue, called They Beat the Girl Out of My Boy, is about the physical abuse many transgendered people suffer.
“They are misunderstood and often picked on,” said Vanderschaeghe, who believes even the Alberta government is biased against people who feel born in the wrong body.
The government last spring cut off funding for doctor-recommended sex-change surgery to save $700,000 a year — which she feels is a paltry sum, considering how much the surgery means to the few individuals who need it.
Vanderschaeghe is thrilled with the diversity of the latest cast, aged 14 to 79.
Among them are a mother and daughter, two sisters, an aboriginal woman, a disabled female and at least one senior. “There are people who work in social services, retired people, a psychotherapist, a college student, a mom of twins and a radio station programmer,” added Vanderschaeghe.
“They are really working hard, and laughing and crying hard, and having really great discussions.”
One participant is Red Deer operating room nurse Cheryl Flynn, a mother of two boys who enjoyed the 2009 performance so much she decided to get involved this year. “It struck me as really important.”
Flynn, who has already started teaching her sons about treating women well, sees a huge educational value in having men as well as women see The Vagina Monologues.
She likes that the production makes audience members laugh uproariously, as well as think about things that make people uncomfortable — even the word vagina, which somehow carries more shock value than the word penis.
“I like that it’s educational and entertaining too,” said Flynn, who has taken to wearing her V-Day T-shirt around town.
“People ask me, ‘What’s the V for,’ and I’ll talk about it to anybody who’ll listen.”
lmichelin@www.reddeeradvocate.com
What: Central Alberta AIDS Network presents Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues
When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Feb. 12 and 13
Where: Red Deer’s Memorial Centre
Tickets:$25 from the Black Knight Ticket Centre