This past Thursday, I went to see "Not Your Mother’s Monologues." The performance was made up of 19 unique pieces, and I was thoroughly impressed by how powerful each woman’s performance was. I, for one, can barely speak at a normal rate in front of my Spanish class when I’m just giving a presentation on the Spanish Equestrian School, so anyone who can get up in front of a room full of people and perform a monologue is basically my hero, especially if they do it with the grace and composure that these ladies did. Now, what exactly was "Not Your Mother’s Monologues" about? Well, it certainly was not my mother’s monologues. (Geez, stop rolling your eyes. Just chuckle. It’s funny.) But in all seriousness, these monologues were definitely different from something my mother would have gone to while she was at college.
Now, I can only base my thoughts off my own experiences with my mother, but from my conversations with her, I think that we mainly differ in our understandings of what it means to be a woman. One time, she yelled at me for having sex with a guy I wasn’t strictly in a relationship with because I wasn’t respecting myself as a woman, and I just shrugged and told her that having sex with said guy didn’t make me feel any more or less of a woman. I just did it because I wanted to. Now, although this is not an incredible, poignant anecdote, what I mean to show with it is that in this generation, how “woman” is defined is both an individual and ongoing process. And I think that is something that's particular to our generation. Now, rather than looking for a definition of woman that applies to everyone, we are constantly learning and recognizing that there really is no single definition because everyone’s experiences differ depending on race, religion, sexuality, heritage or favorite color. "Not Your Mother’s Monologues" did an excellent job at capturing this. Perhaps the directors of the show put it best when they said that this performance was about women but not the universal woman.
In fact, in their speeches before the monologues actually began, the directors of the show went on to point on that, although technically "Not Your Mother’s Monologues" was "finished" in the fact that it was being performed that night, this was probably a play that could never actually be finished because creating a concrete definition of what it means to be a woman is impossible. This was incredibly well put because it leaves the meaning of woman open-ended, to be discussed, changed and morphed by women themselves as time goes on. This open-minded and thoughtful approach is admirable, and the performance itself exemplifies it perfectly. The submissions committee did an excellent job picking 19 pieces from the original 120 to exemplify the open-ended yet comprehensive approach to this project. Though only 19 monologues were performed, they covered a broad range of topics, from failed relationships to almost relationships to cloaks to moving from Bangkok to America. And, though, yes, there was some overlap between monologues, each had its own story to share so that in the two-and-a-half hours of the show, none of the pieces felt repetitive. Rather, they each offered their own individual insight into that woman’s experience of being a woman, thus each adding a new take on what being a woman means.
Now, although this performance overall was called "Not Your Mother’s Monologues," it still, in some ways, referred back to the monologues of our mothers. There were numerous pieces referencing the speaker’s relationship with her mother, and how her mother’s story impacted her own. I particularly liked these because they illustrated how, though these are not our mother’s monologues, our mother’s monologues are still relevant to our own. In other words, this performance both claimed new monologues and recognized that long line of women preceding us, and how we struggle and grapple with their definitions of women and our own.
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