All about Eve

Ensler, a trim woman with a Louise Brooks bob and deep red lipstick, has a speaking style than runs to proudly girlish outbursts. "I love teenage girls," she told the capacity crowd at Longfellow Hall. "I plan to stay between 14 and 17 for the rest of my life. It was the most sexy and intense and fun period -- even though I was depressed most of the time."

Without quite growing up, Ensler has managed to establish herself as one the world's best-known playwrights and most visible activists. To date, there have been more than 2,000 productions worldwide of her play "The Vagina Monologues," which boils down her interviews with more than 200 women about their experiences with violence, abuse -- and pleasure. Her organization, V-Day, has joined with activist groups fighting female genital mutilation in Africa, honor killings in Pakistan, and sexual violence and discrimination at home.

"V," Ensler told audience, stands for vagina, victory -- and valentine. On Feb. 14, 2001, Ensler staged a star-studded benefit reading at Madison Square Garden, where Glenn Close, Winona Ryder, and others performed "The Vagina Monologues" for an audience of 17,000 primed to join in and say the word loud and say it proud. This year's V-Day celebration will center on Juarez, Mexico, where Ensler hopes to lead an army of 100,000 V-warriors to protest the still-unsolved abduction and murder of hundreds of girls and young women, many of whom worked for as little as $6 a day in US-owned maquiladoras. These women, Ensler says, have been used up by the global patriarchy and then thrown away "like an empty Coca-Cola can."

"V" is also for vote. Ensler's group recently launched a gynocentric get-out-the-vote effort aimed at driving George W. Bush from office, along with Condoleezza Rice, Gale Norton, and all the other women who have turned into "male ventriloquists" and apologists for "the Mad Father." The campaign's slogan: "Get your Pussy Posse to the Polls!"

This year, she told the audience Thursday, some of the women of British parliament will stage a reading of "The Vagina Monologues" in honor of V-Day. "We have got to shame our congresswomen. They have got to get on the vagina!"

"The Vagina Monologues" has been performed everywhere from Sarajevo to the Congo to Islamabad, where actors in deep red saris and tunics recently thronged the Marriott Hotel and briefly turned the city, Ensler quips, into "Vaginabad." Here in Boston, the domestic violence-prevention group Second Step will host a benefit performance at the John Hancock Hall on Feb. 5. Andrea J. Cabral, the first female sheriff in Suffolk County history, will be lending her badge to the effort.

Ensler sees the world's women in much the same way she sees the ozone layer: "I'm obsessed with the ozone layer. I dream about it. When the ozone layer goes, the zucchini and the watermelon go, and I happen to be a passionate lover of watermelons. As I've traveled from Cairo to Pakistan to Rome to Juarez, what I've seen is the emergence of an emotional ozone layer. Women are a global emotional resource that's breaking down." Eventually, recalling the horrors she's seen, her eyes clench shut and her voice rises to a fevered crack: "Each one of us has to stop everything we're doing right now and work to stop violence against women."

Jennifer Schuessler is the deputy editor of Ideas.