Ensler's heavily tendentious project here is to make women comfortable with their genitals and with the words used to denote them. Then the piece takes a grim turn as Ensler impersonates a raped Bosnian girl and a sexually abused homeless woman. Ensler's language and rhetoric are not adequate to these experiences. The Bosnian's elegy for her vagina wants to be lyrical but is merely sentimental. A final rhapsody on a witnessed birth does at last achieve poetry and power.
Reformers always take themselves too seriously.
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