The Vagina Monologues…in Spanish

As Sag Harbor actress Minerva Perez Scelza handed out fliers around the East End for the upcoming performance she’s directing of “The Vagina Monologues” in Spanish, she found they inspired some confusion.

“I gave the postcard out to some Latino guys and they looked at me like I was out of my mind,” Ms. Perez Scelza said, laughing. “Like, ‘She just gave me something about her vagina and a monologue? Is she soliciting?’”

Such a reaction did not surprise Ms. Perez Scelza, the executive director of the non-profit Organización Latino Americana of Long Island, or OLA, which is sponsoring the performance. It is precisely the reason she wanted to stage a Spanish production of Eve Ensler’s play, “The Vagina Monologues,” a global hit that has been performed in more than 120 countries, translated into 45 languages and spawned a wildly successful global movement called V-Day that aims to stop violence against women and girls by raising money for anti-violence organizations and promoting creative events.

Among the East End’s Latino community, the topics the monologues explore—female sexuality, domestic abuse, military violence, body image and rape, to name a few—need to be discussed more openly, Ms. Perez Scelza said.

“This topic doesn’t have the same air in the Latino community as it does in the Anglo,” she said. “The

material is scary for the Latino community.”

Ms. Ensler wrote “The Vagina Monologues” in 1996 after talking to more than 200 women about sex, relationships, and violence. The monologues were developed from these conversations and were written as a celebration of women and a source of empowerment by exposing issues that are rarely discussed so frankly. All the monologues come from real women’s experiences and many employ a comic touch in addressing such trials of womanhood as menstruation and visits to the OB/GYN. But others, such as one about a woman who was raped in Bosnia and another about a girl who was sexually abused as a child, are not for the faint of heart.

The 12 women performing in the production are students and community organizers, ranging in age from 13 to 50-something. Most have never been in a play before. Performers include OLA founder Isabel Sepulveda de Scanlon and her two daughters, La Fiesta radio deejay Ana Maria Caraballo and community activist Sandra Dunn.

By performing the play in Spanish, Ms. Perez Scelza hopes to build strength in the East End’s Latina community, inviting the members of that community to join the V-Day movement and the public conversation about violence against women and to feel more comfortable talking about their sexuality.

“Allowing your outrage, fear, sexuality and sadness to be out there in a public forum is giving these women and this community strength,” Ms. Perez Scelza said.

She said she has encountered some skepticism, but that only encourages her. The play will be without a bilingual component, Ms. Perez Scelza decided, to ensure that the Latino community feels as though the play is entirely for them.

According to Ms. Perez Scelza, this is the first play in Spanish on the East End. “I had to go 100 percent Spanish, knowing that it might result in a smaller audience,” she said.

Ms. Perez Scelza said non-Spanish speakers are invited as well. There will be a libretto in English outlining the topics of each monologue. “People go to the opera,” she said, explaining 
that a person doesn’t have to understand the words to understand the 
emotional content. She emphasized that some monologues certainly don’t need a translation, such as the one in which a woman acts out multiple orgasms at its conclusion. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to this room,” she said.

Even though the play is structured as 13 individual monologues, Ms. Perez Scelza sees it as an ensemble performance. She explained that the women will all be seated on stage for the entire show, as each one takes a turn standing up in the spotlight to perform her monologue.

“When a woman is up telling her story, these people need to feel that they are supporting her every word, they need to be there with her. I need them to be there as a group,” Ms. Perez Scelza said.

Ms. Perez Scelza said that to decide who would perform each monologue, she had all the women list and rehearse their three favorites.

“Everyone wanted to do the angry vagina,” she said. But, in the end, she 
listened for the connections each woman could find with individual characters.

“The monologues picked us,” one of the performers, Ms. Caraballo, said.

During individual rehearsals with the women early on, Ms. Perez Scelza said, they simply read the scripts, somewhat dispassionately, to let the words speak and to honor the words and experiences of the real women whose stories are told in the play.

“They’re not trying to be a character, they’re trying to bring their own experience to the character,” Ms. Perez Scelza said. “The truth has to come from them.”

Ms. Perez Scelza said that half of the joy in doing this play is to bring these women to a place they’ve never been before, metaphysically speaking, and to bring issues that are often ignored or repressed into the public forum.

“It’s taboo for us,” one of the performers, Zelda Gonzalez-Mongelluzo, said. “Growing up, you didn’t talk about these issues.”

“The Vagina Monologues” will be performed at 7 p.m. on Saturday, March 28, at the Bridgehampton Community House. Tickets are $15 and proceeds from the event will go to the V-Day movement and the Retreat, an 
East Hampton domestic violence 
shelter. There will be live music, free refreshments by Hampton Coffee Company, and gift bags from Avon and DJ Chile.

Because of the adult content, the show is for ages 16 and older. For reservations, call (631) 574-1040.