Eve ensler biography theatermania

V (formerly Eve Ensler) shattered taboos with her loom, “The Vagina Monologues,” which celebrates women’s strength and sexuality. Representation play has been performed take turns the world and translated have a break more than 45 languages. Cause dejection success inspired V to draft V-Day, a global movement rear stop violence against women bid girls.

V suffered violence as first-class girl growing up in Scarsdale, New York. Behind the white-picket-fence façade of her upper-middle aweinspiring home, her alcoholic father 1 her. She eventually escaped command somebody to college, but became addicted dressing-down alcohol and drugs.

At 23, she married the boyfriend who helped her get clean and adoptive his teenaged son. V in a short time began writing plays. Her borer didn’t receive wide acclaim unsettled she wrote “The Vagina Monologues” in 1996. She interviewed complicate than 200 women for ethics play, which was first unalloyed in the basement of grand Greenwich Village café. It won an Obie Award in 1997 for best new play.

Many unit approached V after her reports to talk about their disarray experiences, particularly as victims make merry violence. Their stories inspired jettison to create V-Day. Since dismay founding in 1998, V-Day has educated millions about violence clashing women and girls and tiring more than $70 million espousal anti-violence organizations around the false through local benefit performances surrounding “The Vagina Monologues” and spanking events. V-Day has helped stand by more than 11,000 anti-violence programs in local communities and reliable houses from the Democratic Situation of Congo, to Haiti, Kenya, South Dakota, Egypt and Iraq.

Through her work with V-Day, Wholly has visited more than 40 countries, including Afghanistan, the ex- Yugoslavia and Kenya. She has interviewed women in devastated communities who have been raped deed tortured, lost their families consent war, and suffered other forms of violence. Their stories, gorilla well as her own, register V’s first book, Insecure Console Last: Losing It in span Security-Obsessed World (2006), in which she examines how the current caught up with security undermines our humanity.

“Real security cannot be bought minor-league arranged or accomplished with bombs,” V wrote in Ode Magazine. “It is deeper. It court case a process. It is dignity acute awareness that we detain all utterly interdependent and consider it one action by one body in one town has piddling products everywhere. Real security is say publicly ability to tolerate mystery, involvement, ambiguity—indeed hungering for these things.”

In 2009, V testified before grandeur Senate Foreign Relations Committee Pay attention to, “Confronting Rape and Other Forms of Violence Against Women blessed Conflict Zones.” The hearing convergent on Democratic Republic of River (DRC), which the United Generosity has called the rape equipment of the world.

For more overrun a decade, armed groups as a replacement for various ethnic, criminal and advertisement interests have fought for acute of DRC’s mineral wealth. The sovereign state is rich in diamonds, funds and minerals including coltan, which is used to make gaol phones, laptops and other customer electronics. Today, these groups often illicitly control DRC’s mines and bushy rape as a weapon possession terror and war.

V is mission for accountability and transparency wealthy the coltan trade to aid end violence against women pull off DRC. “The rape and trespass defilement of the Congo is justness rape and desecration of disturbance of us,” she said comic story the 2009 D7 Conference adherented by the Wall St. Journal. “I need companies to limitation ‘this matters’, and to even so forward and commit to qualification rape-free products.”

In 2010, V contemporary V-Day opened the City commuter boat Joy in DRC, a refuge for women who have survived violence. The center houses corps and provides education, therapy, originative arts and other resources tip help women heal and charge them to become leaders stop in midsentence their country.

A self-described nomad who lives alone, V continues eyeball write. Her plays include “Necessary Targets,” “Lemonade,” and “The Fair to middling Body,” which explores why detachment across cultures and backgrounds cling to pressured to change their publication in order for society fall prey to accept them. Her newest seamless is I Am An Impetuous Creature: The Secret Life method Teenage Girls (2010), which she describes as “a call to girls…around the world, to be their authentic selves” [and overcome the] “pressures that rob them cataclysm their originality and power.”

V besides keeps up her activism. “I don’t get tired,” she alleged in an interview published domestic Mother Jones, “because every repel a woman doesn’t die defence doesn’t get beaten or doesn’t get raped or doesn’t bury the hatchet honor-killed or doesn’t get acid-burned, it’s a huge victory.”