Necessary Targets A Story of Women and War by Eve Ensler
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Book Description

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.

From the Author

Necessary Targets is based on the stories of the women I met in Bosnia. It was their community, their holding on to love, their insane humanity in the face of catastrophe, their staggering refusal to have or seek revenge that fueled me and ultimately moved me to write this play.

When we think of war, we think of it as something that happens to men in fields or jungles. We think of hand grenades and Scud missiles. We think of the moment of violence — the blast, the explosion. But war is also a consequence — the effects of which are not known or felt for months, years, generations. And because consequences are usually not televised, by then the war is no longer sexy — the ratings are gone, consequences remain invisible. .. As long as there are snipers outside Sarajevo, Sarajevo exists. But after the bombing, after the snipers, that's when the real war begins.

When we think of war, we do not think of women. Because the work of survival, of restoration, is not glamorous work. Like most women's work, it is undervalued, underpaid, and impossible. After work, men are often shattered, unable to function. Women not only work, but they create peace networks, find ways bring about healing. They teach in home schools when the school buildings are destroyed. They build gardens in the middle of abandoned railroad tracks. They pick up the pieces, although they usually haven't fired a gun.

About the Author

Eve Ensler

Eve Ensler is an internationally acclaimed playwright whose many works for the stage include Floating Rhonda and the Glue Man, Lemonade, Necessary Targets, and The Vagina Monologues, for which she received an Obie Award. Performances of The Vagina Monologues have raised $25 million to stop violence against abused women and girls around the world. She lives in New York City.

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