Walk into the kitchen of V, the playwright and activist author of “The Vagina Monologues,” and suddenly everything is pink, from the walls to the shades behind the cabinets and beside the sconces.
“Everything in this house, every room was supposed to be some vaginal representation,” said V, formerly known as Eve Ensler, during a recent visit to her home off Hurley Mountain Road as her Mexican rescue dog, Pablo, inspected a new arrival. “Pink is the color of healing. I wanted this house to be a place where when people came here, they felt safe, they felt healed, they felt they belonged.”
Almost three decades after her landmark play reshaped theater and feminist activism, V has taken on a new, earthbound dimension. She’s no longer a Buddhist. She moved to the Hudson Valley from New York City in 2015 after surviving advanced uterine cancer and found a new spirituality with, as she described, “a next phase of falling in love with the mother.”
That vision will be on display on Sunday at St. Gregory’s Church in Woodstock, where V will be in conversation with Gail Straub, the local author who met V at the Women and Power conferences at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y.
“V is extraordinary,” Straub said “Every feminist activist in the global North and South knows V. She’s the gold standard, a visionary’s visionary. If I had to put her in a nutshell, I would call her a graceful revolutionary.”
On tap for V these days is “Dear Everything,” a climate-justice musical heading to BAM with Jane Fonda as narrator, “This Is Crazy,” a mental-health play commissioned by NAMI and a London adaptation of her 2019 memoir, “The Apology.” A 30th-anniversary revival of “The Vagina Monologues” is under consideration.
V’s power stems from art, Straub said.
“She’s used art, theatre, poetry, as a transformational and subversive tool for decades,” Straub said. “She awakens our yearning at a deep level. She’s an antidote.”
V’s 37-acre property, on the Hurley border in the outer more woodsy edges of Kingston, is made up of multiple structures and includes a lake and pool. She still has an apartment in New York. A handful of longtime and newer friends live on the property, a community that formed during the pandemic.
“Fifteen years ago, I got really bad cancer, stage three–four uterine cancer,” V said. “I came really back into my body. But as I did, I also reconnected with the Earth. I knew then in order to live, I had to be with trees, with water.”
She describes herself as “completely a pagan,” praying each day in an “earthship” her friends built for her, “half earth, half chair, when I get in it, I feel like I go into her.”
Her vision has attracted collaborators such as Tony Montenieri, her executive producer and director of artistic campaigns for V-Day, a global activist movement V started in 1998 working at the intersection of art and activism to end violence against women, girls, and the Earth. Montenieri met her in 2003 after he left a career in musical theater.
“I typed in ‘theatrical assistant,’” he said. “An ad came up: playwright seeks assistant. I knew about ‘The Vagina Monologues’ and V-Day and thought, `What a great person to learn from.’”
He joked, “Thanks for taking a chance on this chorus boy.”
Montenieri says he and V are “cosmic collaborators,” adding, “V will always go on. It’s in her blood. She will do everything she can to change minds and consciousness—but always through art.”
V’s activism has a global reach, including the documentary “City of Joy” in Congo, anti-Female Genital Mutilation work in Kenya, campaigns supporting women in Gaza, and underground networks in Afghanistan.
“To tell you I haven’t been sad or depressed or outraged would be a lie,” she said. “It’s been a really hard few years.”
Despair isn’t an option, she said.
“Hope is really a process,” she said. “You just put one foot in front of the other. What are you going to do, stop?”
She laughs, recalling her first effort at organizing.
“In grade school, I organized all the unpopular girls and sadly, they were all very antisocial,” she said. “So it was a failure. But I had an instinct even then.”
Her instinct remains unchanged.
“I don’t want to think about what my life would be like if I weren’t working to transform human consciousness,” she said. “It’s a great life. And it’s not a lonely life.”
Outside her home, as the day fades, friends call goodbye from the doorway. She turned back to the table, to Pablo, to the next play.
“When you feel, then you act,” she said.
Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.