Necessary Targets

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.

"Eve Ensler can soar to Rabelaisian heights or move us with quiet compassion. . . . She may not save the world, but what other playwrights even think of trying?" —Time

"A journey into the very human stories behind the headlines, Necessary Targets lets us peer beneath the head scarves of women whom we recognize as our friends, sisters, and daughters. A brave, powerful, and crucial testimony against violence aimed at women as an act of war." —Meryl Streep