The Show Must Go On: Behind the Scenes of the Vagina Monologues

Every year, the S.A.G.E. Center puts on the hilarious ramblings from women around the world venting about their vaginas and everything associated with them in The Vagina Monologues. The show itself is extremely entertaining, but there is an entire year of planning and decisions that goes on beneath the surface of the show that not many people know about. Gena Hart, a senior at Plymouth State University, was part of the team that made it all happen.

Hart is the Special Events Coordinator at the S.A.G.E. center and acted as a helping coordinator on the planning committee for this year’s performance.

“I did a lot of dirty work,” told Hart, “setting up, anytime flyers needed to be posted anywhere. I did a lot of the errand running.”

The Vagina Monologues is put out by the VDAY (‘V’ can stand for Victory and Vagina) campaign whose global mission is to end violence to all women. Hart worked with her other committee members, as well as the cast to portray that message to the Plymouth community.

“There was a committee of three people including myself that helped make all the decisions like when the show would be, how we would sell tickets, what the prices would be—all of the behind the scenes work.”  This year’s coordinator was Callie Garp, who was in charge of the committee and put in plenty of hours to make sure the show was a success. She “worked 6 to 8 hours every Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday on it,” said Hart, “and then we all supplemented hours in between those.” Hart says the show takes a lot of commitment from the people involved, “it was pretty much an everyday, all day, eat, sleep, and drink Vagina Monologues kind of thing.”

This year’s show held on April 5th, 6th and 7th in Hyde Hall was definitely a success. Between fundraising and ticket sales they raked in about $1600. That money is cut between the chosen beneficiary for that year and the V-Day organization. “Ninety percent of all our proceeds go to the beneficiary. Ten percent of our proceeds go back to V-Day,” explained Hart.

This year’s beneficiary was Plymouth’s own Voices Against Violence, a group that works towards awareness about all kinds of violence with a 24-hour hotline to help anyone in need of information or out of a violent situation.

“This was the first year where we really tried to work together with our beneficiary. We tried to make it as coordinated as possible by having all of the ‘Voices’ people come to different shows and having one member each night come and speak about what they do,” explained Hart

Working with Voices Against Violence seemed to bring the Vagina Monologues to a new level of diversity throughout the Plymouth community. Hart states that “they have a lot of professors that work at Voices and a lot of them also interested in the Vagina Monologues so it was kind of the ideal partnership for the first year of trying to work together.”

The year of planning started out last spring, so next year’s show is already in the works. “We give ourselves maybe a week after the year’s final performance to start planning for next year’s,” explained Hart.

She continues “We do it step-by-step. We start with just the initial planning. We are looking for directors already to get everything set. We want to get as much done before January as possible because in the past ten years everything starts in February and then it’s chaos until April.”