Penis Envy

Overview

Monologist, English teacher, and writer Becky Bondurant sets out to excavate her internalized misogyny. Threading her personal coming-of-age narrative through a Freudian needle, Bondurant weaves from eating disorders and female orgasms to circumcision and breastfeeding against a backdrop of American political crisis. The Broad Street Review’s Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer called Penis Envy “the best kind of monologue show: finely crafted and intimately inhabited,” when it ran as part of the 2024 Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Named “Best of Fringe” by DC Theater Arts at its 2024 Capital Fringe premiere and described by The Washington Post as “vulnerable…funny and inviting,” this solo-show is a frank and philosophical tale of awakening for the post-truth era.

 

Becky Bondurant is a participant in Philly Fringe Postcards, peer-to-peer review experiment created for the 2025 Fringe by Savannah Reich. 

About the Artist

Becky Bondurant is a visual and performance artist, a writer, and an English teacher based in Richmond, VA, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University. Informed by her experiences as a parent, a teacher, a queer, a student of literature, and a former Catholic, Beckys stories unravel extemporaneously, in communion with the audience, and undress taboo topics like sex, age, weight, othering, power, ritual, and death in a style that is often as raunchy and irreverent as it is philosophical. She has studied for three years under master monologist Mike Daisey who has described Becky as "a cross between Sylvia Plath and Mary Katherine Gallagher."