By David Gordon, Managing Editor

As part of the V-Day movement’s commitment to educating the world about violence against women and how to end it, performances of Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues” are staged across the world. Ensler, who founded V-Day, initially wrote the play as a celebratory piece about the vagina and performed it herself Off-Broadway, eventually followed by a rotating ensemble of celebrity monologists.

The V-Day movement allows Universities such as this to perform the piece sans royalty payments. The proceeds from this production, held in the Monroe Lecture Hall Theatre February 19-21, went to the Nassau Coalition Against Domestic Violence. The piece changes from year-to-year, slightly, with the addition and subtraction of certain monologues. Senior Courtney Hahn, who had been in the two previous incarnations of the piece, held directing duties.

There was a distinct passion to the performances (while the play was written as a solo piece, one of the stipulations for production is that it must be performed by a cast larger than five. This year’s cast featured 17). The ladies were not performing the play for the sake of performing the play; they were performing it for themselves, for other women, for the women whose stories were being told.

Freshman Julia Preis delivered “The Flood,” a deeply sad monologue from the perspective of an older woman looking back on why her “down there” was “closed for business,” convincingly and with striking pathos. “The Vagina Workshop,” performed by Chrystina Orlando with a devilish British accent, was as sexy as it was voyeuristic. And there was something very sweet about Alexandra Rightmeyer’s delivery of “I Was There In The Room,” a piece Ensler, who never had children (though she is the step-mother of the actor Dylan McDermott), wrote for her daughter-in-law Shiva and granddaughter Coco on the occasion of Coco’s birth.

But for all the sweet pieces, there are the disturbing ones, like “My Vagina was my Village,” about the raping and ruining of Bosnian and Kosovarian woman by soldiers delivered by Patricia Frey and Jade Keena. And the production closed with a stirring, frightening piece, “A Teenage Girl’s Guide to Surviving Sex Slavery,” captivatingly performed by Keyla Miraldo.

“The Vagina Monologues” has bloomed from a performance piece about the appreciation of vaginas to an awareness piece about sexual abuse and violence against women and girls. It is an important piece, no matter how many times you see it, and Ensler and the V-Day movement should be commended for letting benefit productions such as this one to occur yearly as they do.

Chrystina Orlando in a scene from “The Vagina Monologues.” (Sean M. Gates/The Chronicle)