Step through the cloth vagina hanging at the entrance to Great Escape’s theater and you’ll be birthed into the performance area of “The Vagina Monologues.”

Under the direction of Kim Forde, who also performs in the monologues, five women mount the multi-tiered stage to deliver Eve Ensler’s now-famous monologues about women and their vaginas. The monologues range from the comic to the serious, the bemused to the angry. Forde directs a traditional telling of this story, with the women dressed in black and red and reading from scripts.

The ensemble of actors – Alice Mulconry, Diane Long, Jennifer Long, Forde and Lorna LaBelle – lounge comfortably on the stage, a series of black steps with a red ribbon and red overstuffed pillows, as the audience arrives. They’re drinking glasses of deep red wine and talk lightly to each other and the audience.

Throughout the show, they sit comfortably on Randy Lake’s set, sometimes acting out the other women’s monologues, but most giving the appearance of being at a women’s pajama party, each listening intently to each other’s stories and reacting to them in a collegial, accepting manner.

Forde eases the audience into the play, seamlessly passing from the curtain speech to an invitation to chant vagina to the opening monologues performed as an ensemble piece, with each of the different actors sharing some of the slang used for vaginas and how uncomfortable a word “vagina” is.

The monologues then move from one person to another, with LaBelle acting as a narrator of sorts, providing the transitions between monologues that introduce them and set them in a place and time, as well as putting up the notecards that give the title to the monologues.

Mulconry did a delightfully charming and amusing monologue, “The Flood,” about an elderly woman who hadn’t been “down there” since 1953, in part because of an embarrassing experience she’d had with a boy. The story came out even as Mulconry’s character insisted that you just don’t talk about those things. Mulconry found just the right reticence combined with the suppressed desire to tell this story that had haunted her for so long, finding a way to balance the humorous with the poignant.

She also interpreted “Because He Liked to Look at It” in a highly comedic manner, telling her surprise that a man would enjoy spending hours looking at what she had previously thought was ugly. She fell into a cadence with it that made the delivery predictable. It was an interpretation that left a lot of the loving self-discovery out, especially since it was one of the few monologues that are male-friendly.

Diane Long was sassy and authentic in her monologues. Donning a hat, she opened with “Hair,” talking about a cheating husband who insisted that she shave, something she found uncomfortable and weird. She brought great variety to the sketch “The Vagina Workshop,” in which a woman discovers the beauty of her own vagina and how to achieve orgasm purposefully and not just by accident. Her presentation brought depth to the story, making it easy to relate to what was a rather strange situation.

Her tour-de-force of the evening came with her performance of “The Woman Who Loved To Make Vaginas Happy,” a monologue sharing the story of a tax attorney turned lesbian dominatrix sex worker. She brought a wry humor to the role while finding delicious ways to illustrate all the ways women moan when they’re happy.

Jennifer Long was the youngest of the ensemble and performed the monologues of the younger women, including “My Vagina Was My Village,” “The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could” and “Reclaiming Cunt.” Of all the ensemble members, she showed the least reliance on the script they each carried and read from, and it made her monologues more powerful and intense. It removed that layer of distance that a script can put up, though Ensler’s original directions call for the use of the script during performance.

“My Vagina Was My Village” tells the story of Bosnian women who were interred in rape camps and systematically abused as a tactic of war. Jennifer Long brings a beautiful contrast to the lightness of before and the brokenness of after. When she ends her monologue, a single tear is coursing down her face.

She also has one of the more challenging tasks in “The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could,” a monologue that has frequently been the subject of controversy for its portrayal of a teen having sex with an older woman who seduces her and gives her alcohol. Long effectively ages her character, sharing memories from early childhood to the teen years, and showing as much as telling how the controversial encounter was a healing one for her. She then comes back with the empowering monologue on why she thinks the word “cunt” is beautiful and invites the audience to join her in saying it.

Forde exudes confidence in her roles, making the occasional glimpses of vulnerability that much more powerful. She starts out ranting in “My Angry Vagina,” but turns delightfully coquettish as she describes how you have to work with her vagina and what sort of things could improve tampons, underwear and OB/GYN visits. She is also wonderfully understated in her monologue about “My Short Skirt,” which she reminds people is not an invitation to rape her. She brings a charm to each role that underscores some of the angrier messages and makes them more palatable.

She closes the show with Ensler’s personal monologue, “I Was There in the Room,” a powerful retelling of the birth of her granddaughter and the amazing role that the vagina plays in that miracle.

Together the women are all very supportive of each other’s monologues, though sometimes their directed actions can go just a little over-the-top in a distracting manner, especially during “The Vagina Workshop.” There were also some moments where the use of scripts became distracting and the speakers seemed less than assured with what they were speaking. Falling pages stopped one monologue in the middle, but the actor responded with grace and poise as she worked at finding her place again.

Now nearly 20 years old, “The Vagina Monologues” continues to explore women’s discovery of themselves, their feminism and their sexuality. It tells many stories and is often used as a vehicle for raising money to help prevent violence against women. The Great Escape is using their performances as a fundraiser for the Sexual Assault Services of Calhoun County.