The Vagina Monologues (2025)

If anyone still doubted that men and women are from different planets, consider the performance art that male and female sexuality have produced. On the distaff side, there’s “The Vagina Monologues,” Eve Ensler’s elegant collection of orations based on extensive interviews with women about their sex organ. The vagina is discussed, at length, in monologues that cover such subjects as orgasm, gynecological exams, rape and birth. It’s a tribute to women, a call against violence and a plea for the release of closely held inhibitions. For the boys, the only equivalent is the juvenile nudist spectacle that played Off-Broadway, “Puppetry of the Penis,” sort of a balloon-twisting act with flesh.

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For almost six years now, writer and performer Eve Ensler has been traveling the country with “The Vagina Monologues,” a tour of veritable verbal liberation for the female genitalia. The show has also formed sit-down productions in cities not usually welcome to long theatrical runs (read: Los Angeles), with stars, three at a time, signing up for limited engagements. Now, back in its original one-person format, “The Vagina Monologues” hits HBO, and, while the piece loses some of its force in the more private medium of television, it retains its intelligence, a sense of the poetic and classiness.

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The monologues are not taken verbatim from Ensler’s interviews — these aren’t character sketches or a form of docudrama. They are inspired by the subjects more than direct depictions. Most of them tell stories, but each piece also has its own poetic quality. In tone, they range from the poignant, like a piece about rape, dedicated to the women of Bosnia whom Ensler visited, to the funny, like the one about a man who “loved to look at vaginas,” to the uplifting, represented best by the last monologue, about Ensler watching the birth of her granddaughter.

HBO filmed Ensler performing her monologues at New York Theater Workshop and also videotaped footage of her commenting on the material in her backstage dressing room, adorned with a “vagina friendly map” that documents the places she’s performed. “They love vaginas in Pittsburgh,” she quips. “Who knew?”

The commentary, interspersed throughout, introduces the individual narrative monologues, with titles like “The Flood,” about a woman who had an ill-timed orgasm as a teenager that has limited her for life, and “The Coochie Snorcher That Could,” about a lesbian discovering the pleasures of her clitoris. Often, Ensler will describe the woman who led her to write that particular piece.

Many of these introductions are also used in Ensler’s stage performances, which were originally directed by Joe Mantello. What’s genuinely different about the HBO version is that it includes clips from some new interviews with a variety of women. As she did before, Ensler poses provocative questions, like, “If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?” or “If your vagina spoke two words, what would it say?” None of the women here has any real trouble talking about their private parts –they’re mostly eager. That, of course, says a lot about Ensler’s ability to make them comfortable, even on camera, and about the fact that once the taboo is broken and that titular word, which Ensler herself admits has an awful ring to it, is spoken, the revelations come easily. And every woman can relate.

Paula Heredia’s editing of these interview clips, fast-paced and upbeat, is more effective than the editing of Ensler’s actual performance. Director of photography Daniel Stoloff filmed Ensler from a variety of angles, and Heredia keeps switching from one to the other. This actually breaks up the monologues — they lose some of their plain, straightforward potency — and treats them too much like extended standup routines. While Ensler doesn’t really inhabit the speakers as characters (and when she tries to do an accent, it’s pretty weak), she does attempt to provide a different rhythm for each piece. The filming and editing, meanwhile, remain a bit too constant.

These are pretty minor flaws overall, and a natural result of adapting for TV a show that features little more than Ensler, in Betty Page hairdo and sleek black dress, sitting on a stool in front of red curtains and speaking.

There’s no question that “The Vagina Monologues” works better onstage than on television. The live, communal experience adds power to a show that’s all about freeing up inhibitions.