Saturday we went to a matinee performance of Eve Ensler’s new play, “The Good Body”. This production at Hartford Stage does not feature Eve herself as an actor, but instead Brigitte Viellieu-Davis plays Ensler, with two other actresses - Erica Bradshaw and Judith Delgado - taking on multiple parts. It was a sparsely attended performance, although having never attended a Saturday Matinee I don’t know if this is typical or not. I did note that as a man I was in a definite minority. For a long time I was the only man in the theater; by the time the play began there were still less than three dozen of us. This was probably more men than I saw at the production of “The Vagina Monologues” in the much larger Belding Theater at the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts.

Both Kathleen and I enjoyed the play immensely, it is about women’s body image from the point of view of Eve whose problem is her stomach which is not as flat as she wants, and dozens of other women from across the world who tell her their stories about their own special body part (or parts) with which they are unsatisfied and what they are doing about it. I particularly loved the Indian woman who finally kicked Eve off the treadmill. She told her she did not use the machine to loose her “jolly” (that is her fat) but because it gave her so much more energy for living. She tells Eve “We are all trees, be your own tree.” Eve seems to embrace this advice and tells her husband who travels half way around the world to be with her that she is a tree. He tells her he loves her tree and tells her several good things he loves about her tree, including that it is “sturdy.” “What do you mean, are you saying I’m fat”, and she is off again; he gives up and goes home.

I guess I can identify with her problem with her stomach since I have an issue with mine. My wife does not completely love and embrace this part of my tree. Sturdy is not the word she uses, rather she has said on several occasions that I look pregnant. Anyway it was fun, enjoyable, and hopefully good for every one who sees it.

Read a review of this production in the Hartford Courant or from the New York Times where it was published just last Sunday in the Connecticut Section.