Below the Belt

"The Vagina Monologues" is about to have its Russian debut. But will the sexually explicit, pro-feminist work by U.S. playwright Eve Ensler be lost in translation?

It was only a matter of time before the "The Vagina Monologues" came to Russia, and just as in the original English version of the hit play, there are 128 mentions of female genitalia in the translated script. But translating feminist chutzpah into Russian could be trickier, so the director has prepared an escape plan in case audiences refuse to shout out a certain word beginning with "p."

Opening Sunday at the Hermitage Theater, the first local staging of Eve Ensler's play has attracted plenty of attention in the Russian media, and tickets have sold out for the only two confirmed dates, director Joel Lehtonen said Monday. Yet box-office success is not guaranteed, with the production playing in a venue that has only 100 seats, and with its premiere coming right at the end of the Moscow theater season.

"We will start small and try to promote the show as much as possible by playing and playing and playing," Lehtonen said, admitting that the late start was due to hitches with contracts and investors.

Already staged in more than two dozen countries, the play is based on the stories of over 200 women who talked to Ensler about their attitudes to their vaginas, raising topics from first sexual experiences to childbirth and rape. Like all professional productions of "The Vagina Monologues," the Russian staging is contractually obliged to follow strict conditions dictated by the author, such as no cuts and a bare set of three microphones and three chairs.

"With this play, I never had the aim to demonstrate what I can do as a director. My aim was always to show the play, to initiate a theatrical discussion in Russia," said Lehtonen, a Russia-based Finnish director who studied at the State Institute of Theater Arts, or GITIS, and has previously staged plays at the cutting-edge Playwright and Director Center. Lehtonen considered introducing installations or a slideshow to Ensler's play, but he finally opted for a "classical" version.

The director's main worry is how audiences will react. Even the actresses were initially nervous about reading the script, Lehtonen said, although he only cast women whom he thought would accept the roles. One actress felt uncomfortable about reading lines that included the word "clitoris." She got over her fear by speaking lines from the play out of the blue to her friends and acquaintances.

In one part of the play, an actress encourages the audience to repeat what the director called the "most awful word" in the Russian language. Lehtonen couldn't even bring himself to say pizda, the Russian equivalent of "cunt," in a quiet cafe -- although he conceded that it began with "p" -- so he wasn't optimistic about achieving a mass chorus. One option under consideration is planting some actors in the auditorium to take the lead. "We'll see whether the audience joins in or not," he said.

The word beginning with "p" comes courtesy of Vasiliy Arkanov, the U.S. correspondent for the NTV television network. Arkanov translated "The Vagina Monologues" in 2001 after covering the play for the Russian version of Elle magazine. "While working on the article, I realized that I had to give a reader at least a feel for the play, not just my subjective impressions, and translated two monologues," Arkanov wrote by e-mail Monday. "Once I was done with the article, I thought, why not do the rest?"

Finding equivalents for the play's explicit terms was the greatest challenge, since "it's very hard to talk about sex in Russian without using mat," he explained, using the Russian term for foul language. "I see part of the problem in the fact that we don't have proper words, ones that we can use without blushing and without making everyone around blush."

Arkanov's translation keeps mat to the minimum, using only the "'p' word," as he modestly called it in his e-mail. For the title of the play, he used the word vagina rather than the more common vlagalishche, which he was initially tempted to use, but which he ultimately deemed "too vulgar." He also wanted to keep the play's title close to the original.

"It's not a Russian play," he wrote. "It's a play about American women, about their experience with their word, and it had to be there."