The Good Body

After a successful 3-city sold out run in Cyprus of The Vagina Monologues, XMAS Productions presents The Good Body, another play by Tony award winning playwright Eve Ensler. Ensler is the author of The Vagina Monologues, a theatrical and publishing sensation that has sold half a million copies worldwide and been translated into 28 languages. She is the founder and guiding spirit of V-day, an international movement to end violence against women.(www.vday.org) “Eve Ensler has become a worldwide celebrity icon for women...The capacity to inspire epiphany in others is a life-changing gift." –Guardian

The Good Body is a play that is at once vulnerable, comical and heartbreaking. It consists of monologues - interviews that the writer took of women talking about their bodies. She travelled to forty countries in six years gathering information and researching. The Good Body was first performed on Broadway in New York City in 2004. This was followed by a 20-city national tour in 2005.

"Probably the most important piece of political theatre of the last decade." wrote The New York Times and "Ms Ensler wants to soften the ever-fraught relationship between American women and their bodies, to expose the destructive formulas that lead them to assuage their insecurities by punishing their flesh…rich in pointed, amusing details…forthrightly funny…bristling with wisecracks and exotically harvested snippets of wisdom." Variety called it ‘Hilarious’ and San Francisco Chronicle called it "Passionate, funny, frank, revealing, even shocking and genuinely committed to improving life on this planet."

The Good Body merges cross-cultural explorations with Eve's own personal journey coming to terms with her" less-than-flat, post-forties stomach. Eve Ensler turns her unique eye to the rest of the female form. Whether undergoing bottox injections or living beneath burqas, women of all cultures and backgrounds feel compelled to change the way they look in order to fit in. “Maybe I identify with these women because I have bought into the idea that if my stomach was flat, then I would be good and I would be safe. I would be protected. I would be accepted, admired, important, loved. Maybe because for most of my life I have felt wrong, dirty, guilty and bad, and my stomach is the carrier, the pouch for all that self-hatred. Maybe because my stomach has become the repository for my sorrow, my childhood scars, my unfulfilled ambition, my unexpressed rage.”

Eve Ensler, draws on personal experience, candid interviews, haunting stories and forbidden topics relating to the female body to create a play that both questions and inspires.

"Tell the image makers and magazine sellers and the plastic surgeons that you are not afraid. That what you fear the most is the death of imagination and originality and metaphor and passion. Then be bold and LOVE YOUR BODY. STOP FIXING IT. It was never broken." writes Ensler in The Good Body. In a world where lollipop figures of white actresses in Hollywood are considered culturally palatable internationally, The Good Body was written for the purposes of making women feel positive about and comfortable with themselves and their body image again.

Ensler’s work is perhaps most politically and socially relevant when she invokes what women should really be doing instead of continuing deeply disturbing patterns of self policing and self-loathing. While we are inside looking with dissatisfaction at our reflections in the mirror, the world continues to happen: the troops are not yet home from Iraq, our civil liberties are being pilfered from underneath us, and femicide continues to happen in parts of the world like the Congo, as a tactic of war. According to Ensler, it was never women’s bodies that needed to be fixed; it is the world, in fact, that needs our drastic renovation.

Ensler has written numerous articles for The Guardian, Huffington Post, Washington Post, Utne, International Herald Tribune, Glamour Magazine, Marie Claire and O Magazine. In 2009, Ensler was named one of the US News &World Reports 'Best Leaders' in association with the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School. In 20120 she was named one of the '125 Women Who Changed Our World' by Good Housekeeping Magazine. In 2011 she was named one of Newsweek's '150 Women Who Changed the World' and The Guardians' '100 Most Influential Women.'

Eve Ensler has created V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls through benefit productions of The Vagina Monologues and other artistic works. To date, V-Day has raised more than $85 million and educated millions on the issue of violence against women and how to end it, crafted international educational, media and PSA campaigns, opened the revolutionary City of Joy community in the Republic of Congo and another in the Middle East, reopened and funded over 13,000 communities based anti-violence programs and safe houses around the world.

Our aim is to bring an international cast for this play in order to embrace multiculturalism. The cast is made of 10 women, both professional and amateur actresses: 3 Cypriots, 2 American, 2 British, 2 Romanian and 1 Canadian-Cypriot. (Xenia Joakim, Nedie Antoniades, Tania Skorda, Shaunna Ioannidou, Diane Avraamides, Tessa Kolessides, Jill Mac Donald, Christina Kamberi, Anca Pericleous, and Christina Marouchou.)

Performances will take place on April 5,6,7 and 12,13,14 of 2013 at the Melina Merkouri Hall at 9 pm.

For reservations please email [email protected]

The play’s duration is one hour and fifteen minutes. The monologues will be performed mostly in English, with two exceptions in Greek.

All net profits will go to local charities supporting Children in need and abused children, and the Shelter for Abused Women and Children in Cyprus.