The Vagina Dialogues

What: “on the phone with my mother”

When: Preview: 9:30 p.m., FridayPerformances:

7 p.m., Saturday; 4 p.m., Sunday, Dec. 11

Where: Sisters’ Camelot, 2410 Snelling Ave, Minneapolis

Cost: Free

What do a feminazi, an Earth mama, a Stepford wife and a sex object have in common? (Other than being the suffocating stereotypes the patriarchy has saddled women with for decades — right, ladies?)

These characters are all theatrical fodder for recent University of Minnesota graduate Anna Kunin. She has created “on the phone with my mother” in light of the question, “What does it mean to be a woman?”

In a slew of vignettes, Kunin and her four actors braid together three styles of theater — clowning, storytelling and movement — to get people thinking, laughing and talking about issues of gender. But they’re not out to bash the dudes.

“It’s not a soapbox. It’s also not women on stage being angry about their lot in life or complaining about men,” said Natalia Hokin, a current University theater student who plays the sex object.

“We find the flaws in each of those molds for women and find out why no one could ever really be one of those things,” Hokin added.

The four actors and the director acknowledgethat they are all white, they are all women, they all identify as straight and they are all from the Midwest.

So in the spirit of bringing in a diverse set of perspectives, Kunin held community story circles in her home, serving food and inviting members of her own community.

“My mom was active in the ’60s and ’70s with the anti-war movement and women’s liberation movement,” Kunin said.

Her mom took part in consciousness-raising meetings, in which she talked about gender issues with as many as 40 other women.

“I was like, ‘I’ve never done that — ever!’ Why is that? Why don’t I get a group of people to explore this artistically?” said Kunin.

With a self-designed degree in critical thinking, creativity and social change in her back pocket, Kunin has been grappling with concepts of identity to create the physical space of the play.

She decided that frames and mirrors would do well to illustrate the themes of the play and connect the vignettes together.

“I was looking for an overarching metaphor for identity and thinking of it in terms of frames of identity,” Kunin said.

Kunin’s four actors — two current University students and two recent grads — will further emphasize the theme of identity by distorting the fourth wall.

“There isn’t this secret backstage and then a magic that happens onstage. We put it all out there,” Hokin said.

When the actors change in and out of their stereotype costumes, they’ll do it on stage, in front of the audience.

And when they stop being their stereotypes, they’ll tell real-life stories as their actual selves – Hokin tells the story of the worst date of her life, and Johanna Gorman-Baer relays a tale of her encounter with a heart-sick Irishman.

“How do we tell stories that we find hard to even tell ourselves — in front of an audience, no less,” Kunin said.

Kunin compared her production to a multimedia gallery — in which artists explore one concept from many different angles with many different materials. The frames, the mirrors, the set and the music — chosen by Radio K’s Shelby Thomason — will help draw the vignettes together.

“Just as no one woman is just one stereotype or genre, this play is no stereotype or genre,” Hokin said.