Necessary Targets - by Eve Ensler (Paperback)

About the Book

Ensler tells the story of a young American writer/crusader and a wealthy Park Avenue psychiatrist's encounter with a group of Bosnian refugee women and how they had to learn to live with the realities of war.

Book Synopsis

In her first new work since The Vagina Monologues, her Obie Award-winning smash hit, Eve Ensler tells the story of two American women, a Park Avenue psychiatrist and a human rights worker, who go to Bosnia to help women confront their memories of war and emerge deeply changed themselves. Necessary Targets is a groundbreaking play about women and war--about the violence of dark memories and the enduring resilience of the human spirit.

Melissa, an ambitious young writer, and J.S., a successful but unsatisfied middle-aged psychiatrist, have nothing in common beyond the methods they have been taught to distance themselves from other people. As J.S. begins to feel compassion for the women whose tragedies she has been sent to expose, she turns on Melissa, who finds safety in control. In an unexpected moment of revelation, J.S. and the women she is supposedly treating find a common ground, a place to be taught and a place to learn.

Necessary Targets has been staged in New York by Meryl Streep, Anjelica Huston, and Calista Flockhart, and performed in Sarajevo with Glenn Close and Marisa Tomei.

Review Quotes

"Eve Ensler can soar to Rabelaisian heights or move us with quiet compassion. . . . She may not save the world, but what other playwrights even think of trying?" --Time

"A journey into the very human stories behind the headlines, Necessary Targets lets us peer beneath the head scarves of women whom we recognize as our friends, sisters, and daughters. A brave, powerful, and crucial testimony against violence aimed at women as an act of war." --Meryl Streep

About the Author

Eve Ensler's Obie Award-winning play, The Vagina Monologues, currently running in theaters all over the world, initiated V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women. Ensler received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwriting in 1999.

Join the V-Day movement and help stop violence against women--visit www.vday.org