Eve Ensler takes on other body parts with latest work

NEW YORK-- Now that Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues" has traveled the globe, her stomach has a thing or two to add.

Ensler, the woman who transformed the vagina from a hushed "down there" into a marquee word that tumbles from the mouths of the highest-profile celebrities, has come to accept her private parts.

But it was with some horror, she says, that she looked down at her "not-so-flat, post-40s stomach," and realized her self-hatred had simply crept upward.

Thus was born "The Good Body," Ensler's new play about her own navel-gazing and the extreme efforts women make to shrink, starve, cover and fix their smallest imperfections. Her message? Learn to love your body, then get on with the bigger business of life.

"I want women to be free," she says. "I want us to get up in the morning and go, 'Oh my God, I've got a body, what a miracle!'"

For her one-woman show on Broadway, Ensler interviewed hundreds of women on several continents, visiting an American "fat camp," a Brazilian plastic surgery clinic, Weight Watchers meetings and gyms from Italy to India. Everywhere she went, she found women trying to fix themselves.

Ensler adopts many personas in "The Good Body." As an overweight teenager, she complains that plus sizes are kept in the back "like porn." As a Botox-injected 40-something, she cracks, "My face is numb but I'm insane in here." As Cosmopolitan magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown, she brags, "I'm down to 90 pounds. Another 10 years, I'll be down to nothing."

"There's a strong political and social theme running through this play, but what's nice about it is it's also very funny," says director Peter Askin.

Ensler credits Askin with helping her transform her performance.

For "The Vagina Monologues," she simply read from a stool. In "The Good Body," she does dozens of sit-ups, dashes across the stage and even throws in some dance numbers.

"We initially thought, 'Well maybe I'll get off the stool,"' she says. "I feel like it's a musical now."

Ensler, 51, smiles often and laughs easily. As an activist for nearly 30 years, she has discovered that hitting people over the head with a message usually turns them of. "Humor often works. It seems to get people in a different way."

Her cause remains a serious one: ending violence against women. Ensler was raped and abused by her father as a child and spent years struggling with drug addiction and self-destruction.

"Most of my early years were about just trying to not do myself in," she says. "So I used to have this deal that I said if I get through and I don't do this ... I'll help other people."

Writing helped her turn a corner in her life, and eventually start a global phenomenon. "The Vagina Monologues," which started off-Broadway a decade ago, has been translated into 35 languages and been performed by such stars as Glenn Close, Oprah Winfrey and Winona Ryder.

A benefit performance of the play seven years ago kicked off Ensler's charity, V-Day. It has since raised more than $26 million for shelters for battered women, rape hot lines, safe houses in Africa to protect women from genital mutilation and other causes for women's issues. Last year, there were 2,300 performances of the play on Valentine's Day.

V-Day's original goal was to eradicate violence against women and girls by 2005.

"We've got a lot of work to do," she says with a frustrated laugh. "Look, you know, it was a dream. We're adding a few more years. I'm not going to set any more dates, but I still believe it's possible and I still see it. I'm hoping that in 10 years we'll see such substantial difference. We've had huge victories all over the world, huge victories."

It's easy to understand her optimism as she rattles off cities where V-Day fund-raisers have been held, from Africa to Europe to Asia and the Middle East. Visits to those places for V-Day helped inspire "The Good Body," and the struggles of women in Africa and Afghanistan helped put her own body image in perspective.

In the play, Ensler re-creates a dialogue with a Masai tribeswoman in Africa who compares women's bodies to trees. "Do you say that tree isn't pretty 'cause it doesn't look like that tree? We're all trees. You're a tree. I'm a tree. You've got to love your body, Eve. You've got to love your tree."

During the limited run of "The Good Body," which is set to end Jan. 16, the home furnishing store ABC Carpet & Home will set aside a Love Your Tree space, with art installations and speakers to include Isabella Rossellini, another woman Ensler interviewed for "The Good Body."

Ensler speaks of a recent day when Rossellini came to see the play. Ensler told her, "I can't believe I've been a feminist this many years and I still think this way."

Rossellini responded: "'You? I'm the most beautiful woman in the world and I still hate my stomach."'

"So to me," Ensler says, "that kind of sums it up."

In "The Vagina Monologues," Ensler famously asked women, "If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?" The responses, played for laughs, ranged from a beret to jeans to an evening gown.

So with Ensler's shift of focus, it had to be asked: what would her stomach wear?

She smiles and lifts her black T-shirt, rubbing her belly with obvious satisfaction.

"I think it would just be out today," she says. "I like my stomach today."