Ensler's The Good Body Sets Broadway Dates
The Good Body is a solo show about body image and how women change and mutilate their bodies in order to fit into society's ideals. Whether undergoing Botox or living under burkhas, women of all cultures and backgrounds feel compelled to change the way they look in order to fit in with their particular culture, in order to be accepted, in order to be "good." In The Good Body, Ensler best known for The Vagina Monologues explores those experiences with monologues representing women from Bombay to Beverly Hills. The show is framed by Ensler's own personal journey from a self-loathing teenager to a sometimes self-accepting adult.
The show is coming to Broadway after a public workshop at Seattle Repertory Theatre and a tryout at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater, where it received mixed to positive reviews. Dennis Harvey of Variety wrote of the show: "Just as prior smash The Vagina Monologues struck a popular chord with ideas that had been explored in feminist theater and performance art for decades as Ensler well knows, so Body should build on that success to again draw myriad patrons who've probably never heard of Karen Finley... and wouldn't care to, either. Ensler's standup shtick and somewhat underwhelming skill as a multicharacter thesp, as well as the variable depth to her material, are more obvious this time around, at least in the show's pre-New York City form at American Conservatory Theater… Still, the slickly packaged, intermissionless evening, directed with smooth efficiency by Peter Askin, drew many an approving yelp and affirming sigh from its opening-night aud."
The Good Body will mark Ensler's Broadway debut. The show is scheduled to play a 12-week engagement on the Great White Way through January 16.