For Ensler, a new body part to mull

Eve Ensler, the valiant performance artist whose show “The Vagina Monologues” encouraged A-list celebrities to join her in a celebration of that censored region of the female anatomy, has found a new locus of unnecessary bodily shame to talk about -- her paunch.

“I had finally come to like my vagina,” she confides early on in “The Good Body,” her latest act of corporeal liberation, which opened Wednesday at the Wadsworth Theatre. “Until one day I realized the self-hatred had just crept up into my stomach.”

Comparisons are odious, but her genitals made for slightly more stimulating conversation.

Still, Ensler’s new set of monologues, which had a short run last fall on Broadway, will resonate for those who aren’t perfectly satisfied with how they look in a bathing suit -- and can’t resist finding opportunities to bring it up.

At last count that was most of us, minus Paris Hilton, a few of her scrawny friends and the clientele of the West Hollywood gym I just foolishly joined.

In her days before “The Practice,” Camryn Manheim had an acclaimed off-Broadway show with the terrific title “Wake Up, I’m Fat!” Ensler’s piece, which the author performs solo under the director of Peter Askin, is a journey toward the holy grail of “So what? I’m fat.”

Except Ensler’s not really fat. She’s just a little flabby around the middle. And in a black vest and baggy black pants, you hardly notice -- until she flamboyantly exposes her generous white belly to the audience. It’s meant to be a shock tactic. But the truth is, in most parts of the country, Ensler, with her fetching Louise Brooks bob, would be considered almost slender.

That super-size-me story doesn’t interest her, however -- even if the current epidemics of diabetes and heart disease are every bit as dangerous as the national insanity that’s driving young girls to starve themselves and middle-aged people to surgically modify themselves.

Ensler wants to look instead at the psychological toll on women (men may suffer too, but not on her dime) of a society that tyrannizes with an ideal of beauty that is genetically beyond the reach of 99% of the population. Her reasons are as personal as they are political. And it’s her own pain that rings most true through the nearly dozen interview subjects she impersonates, from Cosmopolitan magazine founder Helen Gurley Brown to an Indian woman working out in a sari and sneakers.

All her life, Ensler tells us, she aspired to be “good.” Trouble is, when she was young, the image of good -- blond, pretty, respectable, thin -- didn’t quite fit her dark, wild and never-quite-skinny-enough picture of herself. It’s a familiar story that inevitably leads to her mother, a villainous Doris Day look-alike who made her feel that she was the ugly puppy in the litter.

There’s no getting around the Oprah factor. But “The Good Body” isn’t trying to break new ground, theatrically or culturally. Its mission is to therapeutically trace how self-hatred is passed down, from society to parents to children, and to instill a counter-message of self-acceptance.

Valuable as this is, it sometimes feels as though we’ve stumbled into a self-help retreat and we’ll soon be expected to start “sharing” our own private travails with dieting. Fortunately, audience participation isn’t required.

And if Ensler isn’t the greatest mimic and her portraits tend to play up broad ethnic markers, she’s a likable host who doesn’t mind humorously airing her own follies with carbs (“bread is Satan”) and cardio (“I strap myself to the treadmill. Four hours, six hours. People are pissed off. I don’t care”).

No surprise that Ensler, a self-described “playwright/performer/activist,” is better at compassion than parody. Even her rage at Cosmo for perpetuating a crippling fantasy of female sex appeal is blunted by her psychoanalytical curiosity about Brown’s childhood torment at the hands of a beauty-worshiping mother.

When “The Good Body” tries to make global connections, with Ensler nattering on about her weight to women in Africa, India and Afghanistan, the playwright seems guilty of trying to artificially import a wider significance, if not annoy the entire planet. Surely there’s a difference between a woman denying herself Haagen-Dazs in Brentwood and an Afghan woman being forbidden by the Taliban to enjoy a bowl of vanilla ice cream.

Ensler’s solidarity is sentimental. But then, as she wisely points out herself, if she could finally stop worrying about being fat, maybe she could more fully experience the world around her.

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‘The Good Body’

Where: Wadsworth Theatre, 11301 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 3 and 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Feb. 12

Price: $30 to $69

Contact: (213) 365-3500

Running time: 1 hour,

25 minutes