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By Andrew Gans
18 Aug 2003

Will Cock Tales become the male Vagina Monologues?

The William Morris Agency hopes so. Variety reports that the famed agency plans to have one of its star directors take over the show's reigns from Cock Tales creator-director Debra De Liso.

An acting and playwriting professor at the University of Southern California, De Liso's work features 13 monologues written by men ages 20-80. With the exception of two monologues — one about a transvestite, the other about a pedophile priest — all are true stories. A press release explains the show's writers "share their private parts and public personas while letting you into their frank, earnest, and sometimes hairy tales. These thrilling new works from extraordinary L.A. based playwrights, detail male sexuality in the modern world of masculinity."

Cock Tales recently played a 10-month engagement in Hollywood at the M Bar and the Elephant and Zephyr theatres. The industry paper says that a revised version of Tales may play the Denver Civic Theatre. DeLiso commented, "[All the previous engagements have] been on my dime. It is time to get real money. If it can fly faster with a name (director), I'm happy to let it go. I am confident it will come back to me."

The Vagina Monologues were just that — solo contemplations on a woman's most intimate body part. Playwright Eve Ensler interviewed 200 diverse women, including the elderly, African-Americans and Bosnian rape victims, asking them a myriad of questions from "What do you call your vagina?" to "If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?" The play has been celebrated for its frank approach to its subject. The show is serious, comic, political, revealing and liberating, observers have said. Joe Mantello staged the lengthy, Off-Broadway run of The Vagina Monologues, which was later filmed for HBO.

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A collection of 12 short plays called The Penis Responds had a brief run Off-Broadway during the New York run of The Vagina Monologues. The comic plays were by On Golden Pond writer Ernest Thompson and starred Thompson and Richard Gilliland.

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