Not long ago, on a beautiful fall evening in 2005 at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Florida, we experienced The Good Body, by Eve Ensler. The performance on November 12th was one that will live with us forever. Ensler was superb both in delivery and performance of her masterfully written script.

We had expected the play to be funny and clever, but what we didn’t expect was the depth of human emotion and the profundity of Ensler’s words. It was like watching literature live. Ensler grabbed every woman in the audience immediately…we all felt the bond of sisterhood as she revealed the nexus of her self-loathing—her stomach. As any woman knows, there is or has been a body part that should be changed, one that is less than our perceived image of perfection. That body part is something that we have focused on, a little while, or maybe all of our lives.

After Ensler’s immediate connectivity with the women in the audience she then built a window that revealed much of the joy as well as the suffering that we women have experienced. All of the stories that Ensler constructed were based on the commonality that women share, our bodies.

Ensler had masterfully woven her personal obsession with her stomach into encounters with wise, humorous, and sometimes tragic women from around the globe. The characters that she introduced us to were as famous as Helen Gurley Brown or as unique as Carol whom Ensler meets in a vulva esteem group, or as comforting as Priya from India. Although most of the characters were delightfully funny and allowed us all to laugh at the part of us that is undeniably connected to the struggle for the good body, there was astonishingly dark dialogue, too.

When a few of the deep and wonderful characters reveal a painful core experience, like being rapped by their father or unloved by their critical mother, as a member of the audience you are taken on a journey into the dark recesses of womankind’s ugly and painful realities. As a fellow sister my heart ached and I found myself in the place these women had been. When the theatre fell dark at the end of one of these powerful scenes, I felt that the place I was in couldn’t be dark enough. There was not enough dark to cover the pain of these women…women just like me.

The play and the book are as funny as they are poignant. If you have a chance to spend an evening with Eve, don’t hesitate; it will be an evening that you won’t soon forget.


Please visit: www.thegoodbody.com

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