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Friday, March 18, 2011

THE Power of Women

By Kathaleen Roberts
Journal Staff Writer
          It's been called a eulogy, a raw rant and a roar, the emotional equivalent of a breached levee.
        When Eve Ensler flew to New Orleans in Katrina's aftermath, she planned to write about the devastation of an American city and the women who survived it. She was horrified after watching the TV montage of drowned abandonment.
        "It was people standing on rooftops waving," Ensler said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles. "I felt angered and enraged and went down there to try to help women."
        Ensler wanted to interview and write about the disaster herself, but her plans changed after she met Carol Bebelle, executive director and co-founder of the city's Ashé Cultural Arts Center.
        "She said, 'Would you do something else?' "
        Bebelle asked the author of "The Vagina Monologues" to help facilitate, direct and edit a piece of original works about women's experiences before, during and after the storm. Those 16 women included a gospel singer, a teenaged filmmaker, a former Las Vegas showgirl and a Mardi Gras Indian matriarch.
        "It was such an honor to be asked that I said yes," Ensler said. "I just think the piece is gorgeous. They wrote the music. They wrote the text. It's a story that needs to be told."
        Recently named one of Newsweek's "150 Women Who Shake the World," Ensler is bringing "Swimming Upstream: A Testimony, A Prayer, a Hallelujah, an Incantation," the results of her encounters with the heart of New Orleans, to the Lensic Performing Arts Center tonight.
        As the city of what was once 500,000 struggles to rebuild, many fear the rest of the country has forgotten the brown water lines of despair, the thousands who lived through the terror of leaving their homes, hours spent drenched in the rain, the Superdome nightmare, the hunger and thirst and the constant specter of rape in the bathrooms.
        One woman wrote about wandering the Walmart aisles looking for chips or some toothpaste "enough for a couple days," then being overwhelmed by nausea at the sight of the empty shelves, avoiding the pet aisle "for the horror of what your pet is living through, lived through, if alive at all."
        Another wrote of disappearing neighbors who didn't make it to their attics. Some were excavated, mummified by mud.
        But it was the women who showed their resilience by tending to the voices on the ground — making sure survivors had food and water, sheltering their neighbors and leading their children to school.
        "Women kept New Orleans together," Ensler said. "Through love, through sheer ingenuity, they kept New Orleans moving forward."
        The author traveled to New Orleans every month for one year to help craft the piece. She met with artists, actors and social workers to share stories and develop a script capturing their experiences.
        "They wrote and wrote and talked and talked and created this exciting piece," she said.
        The play premiered at the Louisiana Superdome in April 2008 during V-Day's 10th anniversary celebration. V-Day is the Ensler-helmed global movement to end violence against women and girls.
        "Swimming Upstream" illuminates the intersection of the larger American experience as it poses important questions about how race, class and gender are tightly intertwined.
        "We had a real cross-section of women," Ensler said. "I wonder if it were a rich, white community if that would have happened."
        Subsequent shows followed in Atlanta, New Orleans and most recently, at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Casts have featured the play's authors, native New Orleans performers and celebrity guest stars, including Jasmine Guy, Shirley Knight, La Chanze, Phylicia Rashad, Anna Deavere Smith and Kerry Washington.
        "We took over the Superdome," Ensler said, "and we turned it into a huge vagina and called it Superlove."
        "It's a celebration of living," she continued. "There's raw, red anger; it's passionate. It's true and it's brilliant. It was wrought from the bodies and the hearts of people who are suffering."
        From Santa Fe, the show moves to Houston on Monday.
       

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