'Vagina Monologues' date? It must be love
By Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Staff Writer
Mark McDonnell really wanted to go to "The Vagina Monologues."
Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser
He even got a night off work just so he could see the national production of Eve Ensler's play about how women think and feel about their most private parts. Taking his fiancee to the show at the Hawai'i Theatre was his idea.
Michele Shay, left, and Mackenzie Phillips tell a Hawai'i Theatre audience how they feel about their most private parts.
But when he started taking heat from friends, the 26-year-old Kailua man blamed it all on her.
"I told a friend at work and he laughed for three minutes straight," McDonnell said. Under pressure, he pulled out The Significant Other excuse. He said his fiancee was the one who wanted to go. She laughed it off. Until he said this: "I found out today there's no nudity, so I'm bummed." That one earned him a slap on the arm.
It takes a lot of love for a couple to enjoy "The Vagina Monologues" together — the kind of love that will get a guy to go to a Lilith Fair concert, to complete the family collection of Indigo Girls CDs or to willingly attend a workshop by a relationship guru.
Just ask Chuck Priest, 35, of Manoa. He knows that kind of love.
He wanted to take his wife to the Natalie Merchant concert but ended up at "The Vagina Monologues" instead. Happily, he might add.
'The Vagina Monologues'
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Hawai'i Theatre
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2 and 7 p.m. today and Feb. 3, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 5 and 8 p.m. Saturday
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$20-$45, at box office and Ticket Plus outlets; discounts for Hawai'i Theatre members, students, seniors and military
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528-0506, 526-4400; group discounts (12 or more), 732-7733
On Maui
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Brooke Shields joins the cast
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Feb. 5 through 10, at Castle Theatre, Maui Arts & Cultural Center
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Curtain times: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 4 and 8 p.m. Saturday, and 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday
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Added performances: 7:30 p.m. Feb. 5 and 6
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$10-$45
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(808) 242-7469
The experience left him feeling like a really sensitive guy.
"My feeling is it allowed me to get really closer with just the whole ... I don't know how to put it, more than just about a body part. And how much joy and history and turmoil is around this," he said. "As a man who likes to fix things, the best thing I can walk away with is just a better understanding."
Of vaginas, that is.
Even after being bombarded with the "V" word, Priest still refrained from saying it.
The mostly female audience got a good laugh out of words rarely heard in routine conversation. Before their eyes, Mackenzie Phillips, who played Julie Cooper on TV's "One Day at a Time," progressed from a sitcom and infomercial actor to specialist in onstage orgasms.
Waiting for the performance to begin, Josh Bauer, 27, of Kailua, was confident that nothing he would see would make him uncomfortable.
"I'm not being dragged, but it was my wife's idea," he said.
Some men wondered what all the fuss was about.
"Who knows?" 55-year-old Dan Daniels of Kane'ohe said. "I might learn something."
Others enjoyed the show in the fellowship of other men.
"I thought it was poignant and sad and funny," said Jeffrey Fox, 48, of Waikiki, who came with his partner. "It ran the spectrum of emotions."
The show involved a bit of audience participation by the men, who at one point were asked to yell out a word not usually yelled out in a nice way.
Gene Allen, 47, and Rex Nockengust, 36, actors and New Yorkers at heart who now call Waikiki home, said they had been waiting for the production that touches on the taboo to make its way here.
"It gives you a different perspective," Allen said.
Nockengust thought of it as "an insight into how the other half thinks."
None of the men polled for their reaction to this week's Honolulu performance by Phillips, Amy J. Carle and Michele Shay would admit that they would rather have been home watching sports.
Reach Tanya Bricking at tbricking@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8026.
Correction: Ticket prices at the Hawaii Theatre for "The Vagina Monologues" are $20-$45. Incorrect information was included in a previous version of this story. Playdates for the show have been extended at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center's Castle Theatre, with 7:30 p.m. performances added Feb. 5 and 6.
