Three burqa-clad figures approach each other cautiously, only revealing themselves once in the relative safety of the store's backroom. Outside, motorized Taliban units patrol the city, always on the lookout for "blasphemers" such as these. The three Afghan women have assembled so surreptitiously, risking a flogging or even death, only to indulge in the simple pleasure of eating vanilla ice cream. It's one of the more powerful scenes -- in an 80-minute, intermissionless play full of them -- of director Delicia Turner Sonnenberg's staging of "The Good Body," currently inhabiting San Diego Repertory Theatre's intimate Lyceum Space.

Karole Foreman, Deanna Driscoll and Linda Libby

Copyright©2008 Ken Jacques

Eve Ensler (of "The Vagina Monologues" fame) wrote "The Good Body" as a sort of follow-up to her groundbreaking first play, which has been performed worldwide in over 100 countries. In her travels both in the U.S. and around the world, she interviewed the women she encountered, often discussing what they liked -- or more often, didn't like -- about their bodies.

In the fashion of true journalistic theatre, "The Good Body" follows a narrator named Eve (played with appealing approachability by Deanna Driscoll) as she travels the world doing just that, all the while trying to come to terms with that part of her own body that she doesn't like. It seems most of us have at least one, and in Eve's case it's her stomach, which isn't as flat as those of the six headless mannequins that are the frame of Victoria Petrovich's blue-splotched scenic design.

The varied assortment of other characters are all played by two of San Diego's finest actresses, Karole Foreman and Linda Libby. Through their deft portrayals, we meet some of the women that Eve encounters.

One of Ms. Libby's more memorable turns is as a wealthy Brentwood housewife. In costume designer Jennifer Brawn Gittings's tasteful green-dress-and-pearls ensemble, Ms. Libby relates the bittersweet story of her vaginal reconstruction, a measured move that has recaptured her husband's interest in sex; it has also had the unfortunate side effect of making that sex uncomfortable and even painful.

Deanna Driscoll and Linda Libby

Copyright©2008 Ken Jacques

Ms. Foreman tells a similar story of surgical alteration as Nina, an Italian woman who has had a double mastectomy. The drastic action was taken not as a form of breast cancer prevention, or to alleviate some other ailment, but in an attempt to regain her mother's love, which came forth freely until Nina grew breasts and discovered that she liked sex.

The other characters, and there are many, all add their two cents to the mix. There's Ms. Foreman's Brazilian supermodel partnered to a plastic surgeon with a Pygmalion complex, and her portrayal of Helen Gurley Brown, the octogenarian publisher of "Cosmopolitan," who isn't too old to do ab crunches in the middle of interviews but concedes that she has never actually felt pretty.

In Africa, Eve meets an elderly Masai woman and again asks the question, "Do you like your body?" Ms. Foreman, as the tribal elder, responds with an incredulous look that says it all, even before she emphatically states, "Of course I do!" The woman goes on to compare human bodies to the trees she sees all around her, coming in all different shapes and sizes, some tall, some short -- but none any less "good" than the other "good bodies" around them.

Such stories force Eve to rethink her own assumptions and thoughts about her body. By the time she gets to India and meets Priya, a woman who toils away on the treadmill but is happy to be a little "jaadi" ("fat"), Eve is able to enjoy every bite of the local carb-filled naan.

Karole Foreman and Deanna Driscoll

Copyright©2008 Ken Jacques

Eve eventually gets to Afghanistan and the clandestine dessert-eating session. Bathed in Eric Lotze's blue lighting, it's a scene of remarkable beauty in its simplicity, and more than anything else seems to put things in perspective.

If the hilarious sequence with the three actresses as spa-robed botox-injected "smileatrons" seems like a brief commercial in the rest of Ms. Ensler's probing script, Ms. Sonnenberg and company are to be commended for a first-rate staging of this important new play.

VIEW PROGRAM HERE (PDF)