“Welcome vaginas, welcome penises,” said Lauren Whalen, to an audience mainly comprised of women, with a light sprinkling of men throughout the room. The crowd chuckled, despite not knowing what to expect of the coming event.

With this simple sentence, she greeted the audience of Sunday’s performance of Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues” at The House Cafe, 263 E. Lincoln Highway.

Whalen, a third year NIU law student and women’s studies teaching assistant, directed and cast the event, which was organized by the NIU Women’s Alliance.

A cast of 27 actresses each held a spiral-bound notebook resembling a diary. The notebooks held the actresses’ lines, which held Ensler’s collection of intimate stories from over 200 interviews.

The show’s light-hearted aspects included commentary regarding female-exclusive ordeals from a preteen’s first menstrual cycle to a vagina’s fear of visits to the “duck-lip”-using gynecologist.

Solemn-toned dictations of war, gang and date rape set the stage for portrayals of women speaking of being robbed of the one thing distinguishing them from masculinity.

Vagina Happy Facts and Vagina Not-So-Happy Facts preceded monologues, feeding audience members factual tidbits on subjects like the ratio of nerve cells in the female genitalia to the number in the male and statistics on victims of female genital mutilation.

“I’ve never heard the word ‘vagina’ used so much,” said DeKalb High School junior Kori Overton.

The show’s premise, as inscribed in the program, “celebrates women’s sexuality and strength and exposes the violations women endure throughout the world.”

The performance’s male audience members captured a glimpse of the feminine experience.

“I think I’m a little disappointed [that] I haven’t been as excited about anything sexual with myself,” said senior music major Mike Bibby. “I saw it two years ago and it was pretty cool, so I thought I’d come see it again.”

“The Vagina Monologues” compliments V-Day, the movement described by Ensler to “stop violence against women and girls.”

Each year, V-Day spotlights a specific vagina-related world issue. This year’s told the story of comfort women in Japan during World War II. Comfort women were used throughout the war by men of the Japanese army for their own entertainment and comfort.

The monologue depicted women’s efforts to seek an apology from the Japanese government. According to the monologue, all mentions of comfort women have been removed from textbooks and other public documents.

“The Woman Who Loved To Make Vaginas Happy,” achieved the loudest roar of applause, with immediate, busy chatter crackling through the audience. The piece acted as an encyclopedia for different classifications of moans. The “mountain-top” and “machine-gun” moans were among those demonstrated.