Tony Winner Eve Ensler Pens Open Letter to Todd Akin on Rape

Today, August 20th, Tony Award winner and playwright, performer, feminist and activist Eve Ensler wrote an open letter on the Huffington Post's website in response to Representative Todd Akin. The Republican Senate nominee from Missouri recently stated that in a "legitimate rape" a woman's body will block an unwanted pregnancy.

"Dear Todd Akin," she began. "I am writing to you tonight about rape. It is 2 AM and I am unable to sleep here in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I am in Bukavu at the City of Joy to serve and support and work with hundreds, thousands of women who have been raped and violated and tortured from this ceaseless war for minerals fought on their bodies."

Ensler received the 2011 Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award for her work as V-Day Founder and her substantial humanitarian efforts.

As a playwright, Ensler has written The Good Body, in which she appeared on on Broadway in 2004 and toured throughout North America following the New York engagement. She also wrote and took the stage in The Vagina Monologues Off-Broadway. The Vagina Monologues has since been translated into 48 languages and performed in more than 140 countries. It won Ensler an Obie Award for Best New Play, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship Award in Playwriting, among many other honors. Her play Emotional Creature made its premiere at Berkeley Rep this June. Ensler's playwriting credits also include Conviction, Lemonade, The Depot, Floating Rhonda and the Glue Man, Extraordinary Measures, Necessary Targets and The Treatment.

Ensler is the author of the book Insecure At Last: Losing It In Our Security-Obsessed World and has dedicated further efforts to the films Until The Violence Stops and the PBS' documentary What I Want My Words To Do To You.

Her latest project, Emotional Creature, will get a New York premiere this fall. Directed by Obie Award-winner Jo Bonney (By the Way, Meet Vera Stark) with original music and musical direction by Charl-Johan Lingenfelder, Emotional Creature will begin previews at The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre at The Pershing Square Signature Center (480 West 42nd Street) on Friday, October 26, 2012 with an official opening night set for Monday, November 12, 2012, direct from an acclaimed World Premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California.