Theatre: The Good Body
Authors: Chloe Veltman
Journal: BMJ (2004)

In a darkened auditorium against a backdrop of loud gurgling and sucking sounds, a 35 year old woman lies on her back, talking about her latest cosmetic surgery procedure. It is the most recent in a long history of operations, which have included everything from liposuction to soy breast implants. Without a hint of irony, the woman says that she is in a sexual relationship with her plastic surgeon, a man who seems to regard himself as something of a Dr Frankenstein and his partner as his most fabulous creation.

In recent years, cosmetic surgery has eked out a whole new niche of reality TV programming, with ABC's Extreme Makeover, MTV's I Want A Famous Face, and Channel 5's Cosmetic Surgery... Live attracting frenzied attention in the United Kingdom and United States (BMJ 2004;328: 1208). Until recently, cosmetic surgery was not a subject commonly tackled on the stage. But in The Good Body, a new play by playwright/performer Eve Ensler, nips and tucks are transported from the operating theatre to the live theatre as part of an attempt to dramatise the perpetually problematic relationship between women and their bodies.

Ensler is best known as the creator of The Vagina Monologues. Based on a series of interviews with women about their sexual organs, this award winning play explores women's sexuality in an alternately funny and disturbing way. Selling out off-Broadway in New York and in London's West End, The Vagina Monologues has since been translated into 35 languages and performed all over the world, both as a solo show by Ensler and by groups of celebrity actresses including Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon, Glenn Close, and Winona Ryder. The success of the play has fuelled V-Day, a global charity founded by Ensler to end violence against women and girls (www.vday.org). ​).




Figure 1



Ensler: dramatising the relationship between women and their bodies




In The Good Body, which is currently premiering at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco before heading to Broadway, Ensler embarks upon a journey to understand both her love-hate relationship with her own body (specifically her flabby tum) and that of women all over the world. Transforming herself expertly into a variety of different characters—from Helen Gurley Brown, the revamper of Cosmopolitan, who at 80 plus years old still performs 200 sit-ups a day, to Bernice, an obese teenager whom Ensler encounters while visiting a fat camp and who calls the playwright a “skinny bitch”—Ensler proves herself to be a consummate comic actress.

The play's most penetrating moments occur when Ensler veils her disgust and sorrow at the lengths some women will go to to achieve physical perfection, under a veneer of sharp characterisation and acerbic wit. In one scene, for instance, Ensler embodies a middle aged woman who undergoes a vaginal tightening procedure at a Beverly Hills clinic to rejuvenate her flaccid marital sex life. The character is funny because she is so credulous, yet the horrific pointlessness of the procedure and its disappointing results are there in the undertow.

In The Vagina Monologues, Ensler achieved both a spectacular literal and figurative climax by presenting a thumping orgasm onstage. In The Good Body, a potentially rich closing scene set at a clandestine women's ice-cream parlour in Afghanistan fails to reach similar transcendent heights. In fact, it is slightly embarrassing: watching Ensler as she histrionically guzzles ice cream, offering vanilla flavoured libations to the women encountered on her journey before tearing off her tight black top and letting her stomach hang out in a final statement of defiance and freedom, gives one a pressing urge to hide behind one's burkha.