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Playwright/actress Eve Ensler relates how she lost her personal connection to her body early in life, and tried to get it back – through anorexia, promiscuity and (this gets a laugh) performance art.

Ensler, best known for “The Vagina Monologues,” is an internationally known activist and theater artist and, for some, a feminist heroine. The pairing of artistic director Diane Paulus (who helms this production) and Ensler is a dream team of much-admired female voices in contemporary theater.

There is a horrible irony here that the woman who got people talking about their bodies had hers ravaged…From the first line of this piece to the sumptuous last image we had in this show, I was completely rapt.

Ensler as a solo performer holds us fast with her huge spirit and energy. She is funny and heartbreaking, a drama queen and a dynamo, and just so completely present and full of LIFE. Every word is the real deal and we feel it.

Eve Ensler navigates her confrontation with cancer with the same unblinking intensity and humor she brought to other “taboo” topics.

“No experience is lost on Eve Ensler. Ensler is an author and artist who has immersed herself in the cause of stopping violence against women.”

Eve Ensler returns to the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) this month with a deeply personal, one-woman show that tells how her work with women brutalized by sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo helped her overcome stage IV uterine cancer.

How do you recover from a childhood with a father who molested you and a mother who emotionally abandoned you? Eve Ensler would be the first to tell you that it’s not an easy path forward, and she stumbled plenty along the way, but eventually she found healing through helping. Her inspiring journey ultimately led to her remarkable humanitarian work in the Congo.

In the play, which is staged in an approximation of Ensler’s New York City loft, the playwright/actress describes her experience of seeing her own illness as part and parcel of violence being done to the physical world.

In this world-premiere adaptation of her critically acclaimed 2013 memoir of the same name, activist and artist Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues, Emotional Creature, The Good Body, O.P.C.) celebrates the strength and joy that connect a single body to the planet. 

Writer and activist Eve Ensler, who is best known for her play “The Vagina Monologues,” went to the Congo to help women victims of violence, and while there learned she had uterine cancer. She recounts her experience in her book “In the Body of the World: A Memoir of Cancer and Connection.”

Ensler’s performance is engaging and without a shred of artifice as she obliterates the fourth wall and addresses the audience in an intimate, conversational style.