By Fenton Davoren
The Clit Soliloquies(TCS) is an episodic play about contemporary womanhood, based on the Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler. If I had to describe it in a phrase, I would find it easier to say what it is not, rather than what it is. It is not a happy play. But nor is it merely a tragedy, much less a farce. It is a play of struggle, constant, unending, and unavoidable. Each emotional monologue is both individually revelatory but also elegantly stitched together into a cohesive feminist masterpiece. Due to the subject matter and variation between scenes, in this article, I’ll be exploring the experience of being in the audience of the play, rather than getting too deep into the specifics of the work in itself. If the reader comes away with anything from my commentary, I would like it to be empathy. In a world engulfed in tragedy, it takes something that cuts deep to communicate as emotionally harrowing a subject as was attempted on the 8th of March, in the Old Refectory. I cannot hope to come close in such a short summary, but hopefully reading this may encourage the reader to watch the play itself.
As you enter the room, the crew hands you a slip of white paper to hold up if you don’t want to be engaged with on the front row. This tiny truce flag serves as an understanding between the performers and those for whom the sensitive nature of content becomes too overwhelming, as it was for some on the night. Then, flagged and ready, the crowd is arranged in two rows of about 20 each. The religious spectacle of the Old Refectory lends a sense of grandeur, but also an unnerving tension between scenes of pious revelation and the women sitting, reading, on plastic chairs upon the stone floor. Two flood lights illuminate the stage as if it is just you and them. It just happens to be raining as the play begins, which seems almost too poetic, as if the elements themselves have aligned just to give the scene a sense of pathetic fallacy.
Is the play moving? Yes. But it is also unexpectedly funny. The play begins and ends in laughter. Most comedy is either funny because it’s absurd or because it’s low-key true, yet the first few scenes of TCS manage to blur the line between both. They’re extremely lewd, as one may expect from the play’s name, but not gratuitously so, and every extraordinarily taboo word makes some deeper point.
As the play progresses, the topics covered become more personal, and thus more dark. Dark in the muted sense (think Catharine Holly in Suddenly Last Summer), with the trauma of each character dismissed and normalised by the society they inhabit. At times, the characters seem uncannily jovial, even comedic, yet they remain forever haunted by the injustice of their situation, forever a moment away from explosion. In these moments, I am grateful to be writing for The Sundial, where I can hide behind my notebook and clinically jot notes through the trauma. Conversely, the crowd bears the brunt of emotion, and tears, gasps and sighs are not uncommon as they mirror the emotions of the actors on stage.
To see a tragedy, feel a tragedy and not have a sense of horror to what you have borne witness to would be inhuman, and that’s really the core of the play’s indelible impact. One of the last scenes, somewhat surprisingly, cites statistics on violence against women, familiar from the characters thus far. These statistics are so effective because they lie within an ideational structure totally apart from their usual more scientific context, embedded within the oppression suffered throughout the play.
In sum, it is difficult to put to words the audience’s experience (for one scene my notes read, in their entirety, “trauma, trauma, TRAUMA”). Yet, one cannot doubt the quality of storytelling involved in effectively unloading emotion on such a scale. As the actors bowed for the last time (to a well-deserved standing ovation), it was as if what had haunted the play had been transferred, dispersed upon the crowd. As if the spectre that had followed each actor would now inhabit us all.
