Capital Fringe: The Goddess Diaries

– by guest writer Carol Lee Campbell-

I created The Goddess Diaries as an experiment after years working as a women’s advocate in the Washington area.

In 2008, I joined with a friend and co-produced Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues as a fundraiser for our local church. I loved how it worked on many levels to inspire the group of women who staged it and to also light a fire under sleepy little Oakton (VA) to help women in our community and raise awareness of critical issues in the outside world.

It dawned on me that this template of monologues could be applied in many facets of women’s lives – we could tap all reaches of the woman’s narrative that were moving, funny and current. We could address not just sexual abuse and sexual health, which is the framework of the Monologues, but could look also to more generalized anxieties in life, like challenging marriages and coming of age stories. And, of course, we could focus on the heavy as well, like eating disorders and suicide.

I asked women in my community to write down their stories and then I tied them together through a common thread: the agricultural seasons of the year. Borrowed from the ancient Western European calendar of equinoxes, solstices and cross-quarter days, each monologue represents a specific time in the growing/harvest season and each season becomes a metaphor for these life events.

The Goddess Diaries also incorporates music and dance performances which are interspersed between each woman’s speech and specifically choreographed to link the pieces together, creating a rich tapestry of speech, sound and movement as expressions of the female journey.

This production is presented as a part of the 2013 Capital Fringe Festival, a program of the Washington, DC non-profit Capital Fringe.

 

— Guest writer Carol Lee Campbell is a writer, artist and educator who combines theater and fundraising efforts to raise awareness of critical issues affecting women and girls. —