The Vagina Monologues is an episodic play written in 1996 by Eve Ensler which developed and premiered at HERE Arts Center, Off-Off-Broadway in New York and was followed by an Off-Broadway run at the Westside Theatre.

"[2] In 2018, The New York Times stated "No recent hour of theater has had a greater impact worldwide" in an article "The Great Work Continues: The 25 Best American Plays Since 'Angels in America'".

[3] Ensler originally starred in both the HERE premiere and in the first off-Broadway production, which was produced by David Stone, Nina Essman, Dan Markley, The Araca Group, Willa Shalit and the West Side Theater.

The play has been staged internationally, and a television version featuring Ensler was produced by cable TV channel HBO.

In 1998, Ensler and others, including Willa Shalit, a producer of the Westside Theatre production, launched V-Day, a global non-profit movement that has raised over US$100 million for groups working to end violence against women (including those who hold fluid identities that are subject to gender-based violence),[4] through benefits of The Vagina Monologues.

[7] The play opened at HERE Arts Center in New York City on October 3, 1996, with a limited run that was scheduled to end November 15 but was extended to December 31.

Soon, Eve Ensler's episodic play had graduated from off-off Broadway to Madison Square Garden to college stages the world over.

[7] The Vagina Monologues is the cornerstone of the V-Day movement, whose participants stage benefit performances of the show and/or host other related events in their communities.

[21] In 2015 a student organization at Mount Holyoke College canceled its annual performance of the play for being, in its opinion, insufficiently inclusive of transgender people.

"At its core", Erin Murphy, the president of the school's theater group, said, "the show offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman.

… Gender is a wide and varied experience, one that cannot simply be reduced to biological or anatomical distinctions, and many of us who have participated in the show have grown increasingly uncomfortable presenting material that is inherently reductionist and exclusive."

These global locations serve to signify the terror that is used to hold the laughter in balance, to validate the seriousness of the enterprise, while the 'vagina' pieces are more directly associated with pleasure and sexuality and set in the United States.

[25] The play has also been criticized by social conservatives, such as the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) and the Network of Enlightened Women.

The TFP denounced it as "a piece replete with sexual encounters, lust, graphic descriptions of masturbation and lesbian behavior",[26] urging students and parents to protest.

In 2000, Robert Swope, a conservative contributor to a Georgetown University newspaper, The Hoya, wrote an article critical of the play.

Swope had previously criticized the play in an article he wrote entitled "Georgetown Women's Center: Indispensable Asset or Improper Expenditure?"

His termination received critical editorial coverage in The Wall Street Journal,[29] Salon,[30] National Review,[31] The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Times, The Weekly Standard, and by Wendy McElroy of iFeminists.