By Megan Rosenfeld
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 11, 2001; Page G01

When Eve Ensler first wrote and performed "The Vagina Monologues" as a one-woman show four years ago, she was in a 100-seat off-off-Broadway theater. It was successful in a New Yorky, performance-arty way, but with that title there was little chance it would be heading for the hinterlands.

Last night 18,000 people were expected to attend a celebrity-packed performance of "Monologues" at Madison Square Garden, just one of 50 observances nationwide of V-Day, the anti-violence movement Ensler developed to put her feminist words into action. This week 250 colleges -- including American, George Washington, Georgetown and Howard universities -- will also observe V-Day (V also stands for Valentine). Jane Fonda, who was among those scheduled to perform at the Garden last night, has given the effort $1 million; productions in New York and six other American cities plus 25 foreign countries contribute a portion of ticket sales to local programs for women. An HBO movie, half documentary and half performance, will air in the fall.

The story of how Ensler's risque theater piece for sophisticates turned into a consciousness-levitating event that supporters hope will have world-changing effects is an extraordinary example of commitment, savvy and a new-girl network feeling its power. Over the past year nearly 70 well-known actresses, including Calista Flockhart, Melissa Joan Hart and Glenn Close, have done the show in rotating trios in New York and Los Angeles, passing the torch every two weeks and boosting audiences to sellouts. They've made the show the thing to do, a badge of honor, and taken it to a level of sisterhood that Ensler, 47, could not have reached alone.

A new power clique, including some senators and congresswomen, will hold a news conference at the Capitol on Wednesday to back more funding to combat violence against women. Ensler said they will urge any woman who has been beaten, raped or abused to send her story to Congress.

That, combined with a proposal for international grass-roots action from yesterday's V-Day gathering in New York, presents the unique and intriguing possibility of artists actually generating or at least influencing government policy. Could it be? Stranger things have happened.

The conceit of the play (which Ensler performed here in 1998 in a record-breaking run at Studio Theatre) is simple, a 90-minute series of stories culled from interviews Ensler conducted with women. Some are whimsical musings on the taboo -- the V-word itself and what it means. Another section is the testimony of a woman raped during Bosnia's civil war (with a change in tone that several critics thought so searing that the rest of the show was trivialized).

But for many in the audience, the main thing to get over is just the word itself, and then the idea of talking about it. For a year, Ensler trooped around the world playing to small audiences of (mostly) women, in tiny theaters or community halls, having been invited by local groups that, as she puts it, braved the huge potential for ridicule.

"In Oklahoma City the newspaper refused to run advertisements for the show," she says. "In some places they would sell out the theater but couldn't print the name of the show on the tickets."

Vagina. Eeeuwwww. Do we have to?

"It makes everyone squirm, until they pass through the window," Ensler says. "It's like flying through the sound barrier. It's almost unbearable to go through the taboo, but then you discover this unbelievable grace, power, joy and sexuality that isn't tainted. You know that if you just go there it will be okay. It's a place we haven't been before. It's what it will look like when women are in power."

Mercedes Ruehl, the Oscar- and Tony-winning actress, heard about the show from Rosie Perez when they and Brooke Shields were working together on a television movie, "Widows." "I didn't like the title," Ruehl says. "It sounded so strident. But Rosie said, 'Just do it. Just go and do it!' And Brooke said, 'If you do it, I'll do it with you.' "

So Ruehl and Shields teamed up with Ana Gasteyer of "Saturday Night Live" for a two-week stint last September (following Teri Garr, Sanaa Lathan and Julianna Margulies) and had a terrific time.

"I found myself being moved every night," Ruehl says. "Some kind of abstract energy was created, some psychic thing among us and between us and the audience. It was hard work, too. . . . The nature of the material is extraordinary. There's the female outcry for sure. And the great mad female survivor humor that's in it."

Ruehl had worried that the piece would be too hectoring or lecturing, but found instead that "it was ruefully good-natured towards men."

Not that Ensler had men in mind when she wrote it.

"I don't understand men," she says. "I love men, I live with a man. But I'm interested in writing for women. If they empower themselves and their vaginas, the world will be a better place."

There's that word again. She uses it all the time! She sees this giant connection between the way women are treated -- one in three around the world has been beaten or raped, she says -- and the current treatment of Mother Earth. Pollution, abuse of resources and haphazard development are all a desecration of the planet, reflected in the abuse of women. Strangers coming together in a theater and sharing an experience can revive a sense of social responsibility, she says.

Randomly interviewed audience members tend not to make such cosmic connections. They find the play funny, mortifying or cathartic. The frank talk about body parts, sex, menstruation and fear seems to summon a kind of dorm-room delight that comes from talking about stuff you thought nobody else experienced. The pieces about rape and sexual abuse create a communal sense of vulnerability and righteous anger.

"I was hysterically crying throughout the performance," says Lisa Gay Hamilton, who went to see Ensler perform the show because her co-star on "The Practice," Dylan McDermott, is Ensler's son (technically a stepson, but they refer to each other otherwise). "I'd never experienced that before -- talking about my vagina. Ever! Not even with my gynecologist."

A few months later Ensler asked Hamilton to do the show with Flockhart and newswoman Linda Ellerbee. Hamilton's main monologue was "The Little Coochi Snorcher That Could." It's based on a teenager Ensler interviewed in a homeless shelter, who'd been sexually abused as a child. She talks about how her trauma was soothed when she was seduced at 13 by a 24-year-old woman, a segment that has prompted a few critics to accuse Ensler of hypocrisy for suggesting it's all right for an older woman to seduce an underage girl, rather than calling it statutory rape, as it would be for a man. Hamilton dismisses this charge because, she says, the two women had a consensual relationship.

Part of Ensler's brilliance is knowing how to tap into the celebrity guilt of good liberal actresses who are not doing theater anymore but are rich and famous from television and movies. By doing two weeks in "The Vagina Monologues" for scale wages they can rejoin the sisterhood and have fun doing live theater.

"Unfortunately we live in a celebrity culture," Ensler says, somewhat apologetically. "But the experience has been transformative for a lot of these women. Don't forget, they have been exploited and objectified by the [entertainment] industry, too."

Hamilton, a more politically motivated actress than most, found the experience almost a dream come true. "To me, this is the purest form of theater -- no set, no costumes, no helicopter, no intermission. It's the audience, the lights, me and them. Sharing these truthful stories and experiences . . . I would trade 'The Practice' any day to be with Eve. She's doing the work! She's not some wealthy woman driving a Porsche through the Hamptons. For an actress, if I can take an hour and a half out of your life, make you sit down and listen to what I have to say and it changes you -- makes you mad, happy, sad -- boy, oh boy, have I done my job."

She has plenty of friends in the business who won't do it, however; who won't even see it. It's that word. "They say, 'Absolutely not! The title alone -- we don't even want to say the word in public!' "

For Ellerbee, who hadn't acted since she played an ear of corn in a grade school play, the experience was not as much artistic as what could be dubbed fun feminism. One of the monologues she has performed is "The Angry Vagina," which she describes as "a rant about gynecological exams, thong underwear and tampons. It always brings the house down."

She's noticed that women in the audience, especially older ones, tend to enter the theater a little bashfully. "You'll hear a tiny giggle, then an escaped titter, and by the end they are hooting and hollering. If you go out after the play you hear other women talking about their own experiences, not the play." They thank her, and confide in her as well -- one friend confessed that the first time she had an orgasm she thought it was an epileptic fit and demanded to be taken to the emergency room. She'd never told anyone before.

"You realize how much we have never said to each other." But the laughs have had their counterparts in tears; it is not uncommon for women to start sobbing and leave. At a performance in Santa Fe, Ensler asked all the women in the audience who had been victims of abuse to stand up, and three-quarters of them did.

"So many women came up to me after a show and said they had been beaten or abused or raped, it was making me insane," Ensler said. In 1998 she decided to start V-Day to raise money for grass-roots organizations. This year's event also features a day-long gathering to ratify a "Global Vision to End Violence Against Women." Sixty entrants in a "Stop Rape" contest have been flown to New York from around the world, and six of them were picked as winners. Ensler shared some of the ideas that have been coming in.

"One suggested a global Web site to list all rapists and abusers, because so many women have no place to say it." The idea of withholding sex -- the "Lysistrata" concept -- is going around in some countries, she adds. "And there's something involving chili powder from India."

With enough female will, violence against women will no longer be tolerated, she believes. The world can be changed. Look at what's happened in just four years!

She's going to say it one more time: "It's a vagina miracle!"

The Vagina Monologues will be performed by a group of George Washington University students Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. at Western Presbyterian Church, 2401 Virginia Ave. NW. Proceeds will benefit the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, Women Empowered Against Violence and Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive. For information, call 202-835-8383.