Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues,” the revolutionary theater piece that detonated in mid-1990s New York City and was staged at Clatsop Community College last week, plays a full emotional scale, ranging in tone from stand-up to therapy session, confessional to human rights advocacy.

One monologue is about a lawyer-turned-dominatrix who helps other women find their “power moan,” another is about a girl in a Bosnian rape camp.

Vaginas, in a sense, become characters in the show — which begins lightheartedly, posing such questions as, “If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?” — before they are subject to violence. We come to know them, love them, then see them brutalized. The monologues, based on dozens of interviews Ensler collected, read like dispatches from a private, uncertain world, and we are cast in the role of witness bearers.

As a man, I am acutely aware that I must tread carefully here. My instinct is to shift the subject to ground I’m better qualified to write about: stagecraft, storytelling devices, effectiveness of performance. But, of course, that would miss the point of the “Monologues,” which is to give voice to the abundance of experiences — heartwarming, heartbreaking, hilarious and horrifying — that involve vaginas. Indeed, these experiences take place because the speakers have vaginas, and however high my consciousness is raised, I can only understand these experiences indirectly.

Mindy Stokes, who leads the college’s women’s studies faculty and directed the show, said the play’s reason for being, in part, is to make it easier to talk about these experiences.

“Twenty years ago, people weren’t used to hearing the word ‘vagina,” she told me after the play. “If you can’t say the word ‘vagina,’ then you can’t say what happens to them.”

If you can’t say the word, you can’t talk about rape, she said. “You can’t talk about sex crimes.”

Stokes’ production, starring a cast of college students, staff and local feminist activists, was performed in Clatsop’s Royal Nebeker Gallery. The small venue (which, as it happens, was decked out in the “Au Naturel” nude art exhibit) heightened the intimacy between speakers and spectators, as if we had been allowed into Ensler’s interview room. I watched fellow showgoers laugh with recognition, gasp with dismay, learn something they didn’t know before. (Proceeds benefit The Harbor, an organization that supports survivors of domestic and sexual violence.)

I read the “Monologues” for the first time last year, though highlights (“Who needs a hand gun when you’ve got a semi-automatic?”) had already entered my brain by osmosis. It’s a script I wish I’d encountered as a teenager, while my views of women were being subtly shaped by sophomoric sitcoms and crude media personalities — views I had to drill out of my head as an adult for the same reason my dentist drilled the mercury fillings out of my teeth (to steal an analogy from Bill Maher): to keep the toxicity from spreading and doing permanent damage.

If some of Ensler’s monologues feel slightly dated — I’m thinking, for instance, of the one where the c-word is shouted as a way to reclaim it — well, that’s to be expected. The conversational landscape has changed. If it’s no longer startling to hear the word “vagina” uttered so often in such a short time frame, we can probably thank Ensler for that.

But several monologues sound as if they could have been composed yesterday, sometimes depressingly so, as they reckon with childhood molestation, female genital mutilation, rape as the spoils of war and the blaming, shaming and stigmatizing of victims.

Stokes, who has mounted several versions of the show, pointed out that, in the #MeToo era, the monologue “My Short Skirt,” a piece about what a short skirt means — and doesn’t mean — resonates anew. It used to be normal, she said, for skirt length to be invoked as a rape defense.

“The No. 1 predeterminate to being raped is being female,” Stokes said. “Not anything that you’re wearing — not if you’re drunk, not if you’re high, not if you’re wearing a short skirt.”

“My Short Skirt” was, in fact, not part of a show that Stokes directed in 2013. For each V-Day (Feb. 14) — a worldwide movement, now in its 20th year, that Ensler founded to end violence against women and girls — the prescribed set changes.

“The Vagina Monologues,” a friend pointed out, is a kind of “living document,” built to respond to cultural changes, amended and reinterpreted in the light of current needs. As the basis for an ongoing dialogue, it can stay ahead of the curve — thought-provoking, transgressive, powerful and brave.

Erick Bengel is The Daily Astorian’s features editor.