The Vagina Monologues’ Off-Broadway opening on October 3, 1999, marked a new public life for Eve Ensler’s play. At the Westside Arts Theatre, a production led by David Stone did more than extend the play’s theatrical run: it offered a way to channel ticket sales into V-Day, joining the circulation of a performance to a movement against violence against women.

From Benefit Event to New Production

The play had already served as the centerpiece of V-Day 1998, a celebrity benefit at New York City’s Hammerstein Ballroom Theatre. That sold-out performance launched the V-Day movement and its fundraising and awareness-raising events; people continued to clamor outside for admission even after the house was full. The Off-Broadway opening the following year therefore followed an initial public event that had already demonstrated how the play could gather audiences around a cause.

The 1999 production opened at the Westside Arts Theatre on October 3. Ensler describes it as the play’s “second life,” distinguishing this production from the earlier benefit performance while presenting it as a renewal rather than a departure. The work could now reach audiences through a sustained theatrical production as well as through special events organized around V-Day.

Production and Movement

David Stone, the production’s lead producer, was central to that transition. Ensler credits his vision, tenacity, and faith in the play with helping bring it into the world. His contribution also had a practical consequence for the movement: he found a way for ticket sales to support V-Day. The production’s commercial mechanism thus became a means of sustaining activism, connecting each audience’s attendance to resources for the larger campaign.

Stone’s involvement extended beyond producing the show. Ensler specifically thanks him for committing himself to the V-Day movement, describing his participation as wholehearted. In her account, the Off-Broadway production and the movement are not parallel projects: theatrical production supplied a route through which the movement could gain support, while the movement gave the play’s public presence a purpose beyond performance alone.

Performance and Audience

The play’s earlier benefit performance offers a vivid account of how its words worked in a room. At the 1998 event, the audience included men and women, students and businesspeople, mothers and activists. Their responses moved between laughter, gasps, silence, tears, and cheers. The varied reactions register the performance as a live encounter: the audience did not receive the play in a single emotional mode, but responded to it through successive shifts in attention and feeling.

That collective reception helps clarify what the later Off-Broadway production extended. The play’s public force depended not only on its written stories but also on their performance before audiences who could recognize, react, and gather together. At the same time, the wider V-Day project did not require every presentation to reproduce one fixed theatrical format. Participating schools staged the same play in forms ranging from intimate readings to elaborate theatrical and social events; some added post-performance “Vagina Dialogues,” counselors, fundraisers, parties, music, art, or dance. The contrast between a dedicated Off-Broadway run and varied community productions shows how the text could travel through distinct settings while remaining attached to a shared cause.

Significance and Legacy

The opening’s significance lies in the convergence it made possible: a play that had launched V-Day as a benefit could acquire a second theatrical life while its ticket revenue supported the movement it helped inspire. The movement’s message was carried both through performance and through the practical organization surrounding it. In this account, theatre was not simply a platform for speaking about violence against women; its production and sales could also help finance organized action.

That convergence unfolded against the silence the play sought to unsettle. Ensler recalls growing up without ever hearing the word “clitoris,” leaving an area of the body unnamed and her vulnerable to shame, dirty jokes, and the assumption that men—whether lovers or physicians—knew more about women’s bodies than women did. Her interviews with more than two hundred women became the basis for monologues, while a workshop exercise asking participants to examine themselves with hand mirrors exposed how much of her own knowledge had rested on hearsay or invention. The play’s movement from such intimate gaps in bodily knowledge to public stages and organized events makes the Off-Broadway production part of a larger effort to bring women’s speech into view and give it material reach.

The opening did not stand apart from V-Day’s later, locally varied work. At participating schools, performances could be followed by conversations and access to sexual-assault counselors; one university’s production was threatened by antagonistic flyers and a possible disruption, which its student director answered by inviting the men responsible to attend. In another documented event, organizers raised $3,332 for three Arizona groups working against domestic violence and sexual assault, and used audience members standing at the show’s beginning to make a statistic visible. These examples are not details of the Westside Arts Theatre production, but they show the kind of community action to which the play’s movement-linked theatrical life could contribute: performance made a gathering possible, while local organizers shaped that gathering into fundraising, dialogue, or direct engagement.