For the 11th year, Bates students are supporting efforts to reduce domestic violence with a production of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, in performances at 7:30 p.m. Friday through Sunday, Feb. 11-13, in Gannett Theater, Pettigrew Hall, 305 College St.

Tickets are $5 and available at the door. Proceeds will go to Safe Voices, an Auburn nonprofit that supports victims of domestic violence. Formerly known as the Abused Women’s Advocacy Project, the organization changed its name to emphasize its gender-neutral mission.

For more information about the production, please contact srooth@bates.edu.

The play is produced by the Robinson Players, a student-run theater group. This year’s show debuts the directing skills of Marketa Ort ’13 of New York City. Ort has done much acting at Bates, including the 2010 production of Vagina Monologues and theater department productions of All the World’s a Grave and Fuddy Meers.

“I’m so happy to have had this experience,” Ort says. Going from acting to directing, she says, has “given me a new outlook on theater.”

Performed every February, the Bates production takes place around Valentine’s Day and harmonizes with the national V-Day campaign to stop violence against women.

Ensler based The Vagina Monologues on interviews with more than 200 women about their sexuality, their bodies and their stories of violence and sexual abuse. The result is a collection of women’s stories that are personal yet universal, comic and poignant, brazen and mysterious.

The play premiered 15 years ago and has since enlightened, shocked and entertained audiences all over the world. Variety magazine called it “spellbinding, funny, and almost unbearably moving. …Written with a bluntness that is nevertheless intensely lyrical, it is both a work of art and an incisive piece of cultural history, a poem and a polemic, a performance and a balm and benediction.”

Productions have featured such top actors as Glenn Close, Cate Blanchett, Susan Sarandon, Marisa Tomei, Rosie Perez, Lily Tomlin, Kate Winslett, Melanie Griffith and Calista Flockhart.

In 1998, Ensler founded the organization V-Day to parlay the play’s success into an effective force for social and political change.

The Bates actresses will also sell chocolate lollipops at the college’s dining Commons to raise funds. Ort notes, “When students donate money to a cause, it makes more Batesies want to participate, and I love that about this college community.”

– Kelly Cox ’11

Michelle Schloss, a sophomore from Farmington, Conn., directs the 10th annual Bates College production of Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues” in performances at 8:30 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 5-7, in Gannett Theater, Pettigrew Hall, 305 College St.

The production is sponsored by the Robinson Players, a student theater group at Bates. Admission is $5, with proceeds supporting the Auburn-based Abused Women’s Advocacy Project. Seating is general admission. For more information, please call 207-786-6135.
Ensler based “The Vagina Monologues” on interviews that she conducted with more than 200 women about their sexuality, their bodies and their stories of violence and sexual abuse. The result is a collection of women’s stories that are personal yet universal, comic and poignant, brazen and mysterious.

“The Vagina Monologues is so popular because it acknowledges a body part we rarely speak about,” says Schloss. “The monologues are arranged such that they’re raw and honest in a way that women rarely are about such personal matters, except maybe to our closest friends.

“And that’s the great thing about The Vagina Monologues: Instantly, the audience and the cast become the best of friends, as we’re able to share some extremely personal stories and secrets. This everyday wall of common decency and the social custom to refrain from over-sharing is broken down right when the show begins. That’s incredibly freeing for both the cast and the audience.”

The play premiered 14 years ago and has since enlightened, shocked and entertained audiences all over the world. In 1998, Ensler founded the organization V-Day as a means to parlay the play’s success into an effective force for social and political change. (For more information, see the V-Day Web site.)

The first Bates production took place in 2001, directed by Ariana Margolis ’02, who directed the piece again the following year.

Ensler’s play has received worldwide acclaim since its Obie-winning premiere. Productions have featured such top actors as Glenn Close, Cate Blanchett, Susan Sarandon, Marisa Tomei, Rosie Perez, Lily Tomlin, Kate Winslett, Melanie Griffith and Calista Flockhart.

Amanda Harrow has pursued her interest in child-protection policy and practice through an internship with the Massachusetts Department of Social Services and through her Bates senior thesis, which has examined interventional approaches to domestic violence through service-learning work at the Abused Women’s Advocacy Project, Lewiston.

For her Watson Fellowship research year, which begins this summer, “in each country I’m looking at a different aspect or a different player in the realm of protecting kids,” Harrow explains.

In New Zealand, she will research family counseling practices adapted by the state from the customs of the indigenous Maori people.

In Peru, she will look at the role played by nongovernmental organizations in child protection and adoption, as well as residual effects on domestic violence rates from the long war against the Shining Path insurgency.

In Uganda, Harrow will investigate how various religious organizations function in the child-protection role and how AIDS has affected traditionally resilient family structures. Finally, in Sweden, she plans to examine the correlation between the robust state welfare system and low rates of child abuse.

Harrow is also one of two recipients of Bates’ 2006 William Stringfellow Award in Justice and Peace, bestowed in March. An organizer of the New World Coalition and the Women’s Resource Center, and a member of the Bates Emergency Medical Services board, Harrow has been active in various social justice groups in Lewiston-Auburn. She has worked extensively to promote gender equality and redress the consequences of inequality through her work with the Abused Women’s Advocacy Project, the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women and RAINN, the national sexual assault hotline.

The Watson “is really amazing, and it’s an honor,” Harrow says. “I’m really excited, and I’m definitely slightly terrified,” she adds with a laugh.