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The Rice Thresher
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For the third time, Lovett stages Eve Ensler's play at Rice Elizabeth Jardina thresher editorial staff
And it doesn't end there. He can also discuss orgasms, menstruation and pubic hair without looking nervous or cracking a smile. And don't even get him started on the infamous C-word. Barker, a Lovett College senior, has been involved in The Vagina Monologues since his sophomore year when he co-directed the all-female production. He knows his vaginas. "I was made honorary vagina the first year," he said. "They gave me a little vagina soap-on-a-rope." Eve Ensler's play, a collection of pieces about aspects of female genitalia, has been produced as part of an international initiative called V-Day in mid-February since 1998. The productions, which will be happening at 225 universities around the world, will benefit local women's organizations. The show came to Rice when Theater Professor Emeritus Sandy Havens received a copy of the script through the V-Day initiative in 1998. He passed it on to then-Women's Resource Center Student Director Dana McGrath (Lovett '99). She asked Barker if he would direct it with her the next semester. "I'd never heard of it, but I was like, 'Yeah, cool, whatever,'" he said. "I read it over break. I was like, 'Oh, shit. Oh no.' The introduction's fine, but the first piece is 'Hair.' It's all about pubic hair and stuff, and I was like, 'This is kind of gross. What the heck have I done to myself?'" But Barker couldn't back out. "Although it scared me, and I wasn't comfortable with it, I was excited about the idea of doing something that most people would be uncomfortable with," he said. "That didn't fix it - I was still not ready . to sit around and talk to girls about menstruation and orgasms and stuff, but at some point you're presented in life with an opportunity and you either bite the bullet and confront your fears or you lose the opportunity." Learning to talk about taboo subjects helped him become more comfortable. "It left me with a sense of a silly liberation - I was no longer afraid of any of that shit," he said. The Rice community responded well to The Vagina Monologues that first year. "Toward the end of our run, we were turning an audience's worth of people away," Barker said. Last year, Hanszen College senior Jenn Hitt took over the directing reins, but Barker is back for his senior year. Also directing are Wiess College sophomore Teresa Kubos and Wiess junior Elisa Silva. The three first worked together on Wiess College's production of SubUrbia last fall. Despite their combined theatrical experience and Barker's familiarity with The Vagina Monologues, the path hasn't been entirely smooth. The directors held auditions two weeks ago, leaving them with little time to rehearse. And there was a kink in the auditions. "When we did auditions, the first night we did orgasm exercises," Silva said. "We thought that was going to be the way to go, because if they saw us [three] doing it, everybody would chime in and be all happy and comfortable," Silva said. "And people did give it their best shot, for the most part - it was pretty loud in here." "A couple of people left," Kubos added. Silva said, "We had some people walk out, and [some] just weren't really comfortable with it. So for the second half of auditions we realized that wasn't the best way to go." Still, they found a full cast, including Hanszen College Resident Associate Mona Hicks, who is also the director of the Women's Resource Center, and Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Department Coordinator Kay McStay. Kubos explained how she and her co-directors dealt with the awkwardness factor of the word "vagina," which is spoken 128 times in the play. "The more that I hear the actresses say it and the more I get into it, the more I become much more comfortable - and I won't say desensitized, because desensitizing something means not caring about it," Kubos said. "It's really about becoming more comfortable about it and learning more." Barker jumped in to give the example of "Reclaiming Cunt," one of the pieces in the show. "It's a harsh word," he said. "It's possibly the dirtiest word in our language. There's not much more to call somebody in one word that's so completely degrading and carries with it so many nasty connotations. But what this piece does is they break it down into individual linguistic elements - the letters and the sounds, and they present other words that have similar sounds and letters. "And what you realize is that all the time it's this word that's been giving you the chills, and it's just a word. It's just a collection of sounds," he said. "And there's no reason to be afraid of it, there's no reason to lay all these connotations on it, it's a word that expresses and describes a certain part of the body." Will Rice College junior Lindsay Trott is acting in the play for the second time. In the 1999 production, she played an elderly woman from Brooklyn who didn't want to talk about her "down there" in "The Flood." This year she'll perform the pieces "Because He Liked to Look at It" and "My Angry Vagina." The latter is a piece added to the script for this year. Trott said she plays a woman who's "really pissed about how vaginas are treated. She goes off on Pap spears and visits to the gynecologist and tampons and thong underwear." She said she hasn't gotten over the anxiety of talking about "down there" in front of an audience, though. "I'm going to give the script the best justice that I can, but, me, on the inside, I'm nervous as hell," Trott said. "But still, it's nothing that we should be ashamed of. "Half of us have vaginas anyway that we have to think about at some point." The Vagina Monologues will be performed at Lyle's, the Lovett basement, on Feb. 15, 16 and 17. Curtain is at 8 p.m. and admission is $2. Proceeds will benefit Maya's Place, an organization that assists women with terminal diseases. The production is co-sponsored by Lovett and Wiess Colleges.
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