Penis Envy

Overview

In America, even a mid-life crisis is political.

Monologist, English teacher, and writer Becky Bondurant threads her personal coming-of-middle-age narrative through a Freudian needle, weaving from eating disorders and female orgasms to circumcision and breastfeeding against the backdrop of a political crisis. Like a filthy and frank remix of “What the Constitution Means to Me,” this monologue is an absurd tale of parenting in the post-truth era.

After two years of study under master monologist Mike Daisey, Becky performed “Penis Envy” as part of DC’s Capital Fringe Festival 2024 where it received praise from reviewers such as Chris Klimek who wrote in The Washington Post, “I loved ‘Penis Envy,’” and described the show as “vulnerable…funny and inviting.” DC Theater Arts named “Penis Envy” among the “Best of Fringe 2024,” giving it 5 stars and calling Bondurant “a virtuoso writer and performer. Don’t miss it.”

About the Artist

Becky Bondurant is a visual and performance artist, a writer, and English teacher based in Norfolk, VA, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University. Informed by her experiences as a parent, a teacher and student of literature, and a former Catholic school girl, Becky’s 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. Mike Daisey has described Becky as "a cross between Sylvia Plath and Mary Katherine Gallagher."