Featuring a cast of six – including four undiscovered young South African actors sourced from auditions across a range of high schools in Johannesburg, this is the production’s first South African run at the Laboratory at the Market Theatre from 15 to 29 July.

Originally published as a book by world-acclaimed playwright, author and activist, Eve Ensler, I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls is composed of fictional monologues and stories inspired by girls around the globe. The work boldly expresses the often-unheard voices of young girls from across the world, demonstrating both the diversity and commonality of issues they grapple with.

Among the girls Ensler creates are an American who struggles with peer pressure in a suburban high school; an anorexic blogging as she eats less and less; a Masai girl from Kenya unwilling to endure female genital mutilation; a Bulgarian sex slave, no more than 15; a Chinese factory worker making Barbies; an Iranian student who is tricked into a nose job; and a pregnant girl trying to decide if she should keep her baby.

The South African production of I Am an Emotional Creature in its current six-actor format, will be staged in South Africa as a workshopped play, and run from 15 to 29 July. A powerful and moving fictional work, I Am an Emotional Creature prioritises the all-too-often marginalised voices of girls across national, cultural and class lines. Placing their stories squarely centre stage, the production explores the issues that preoccupy girls worldwide, giving full expression to their most innermost thoughts and secret voices.

“I felt it was so important to begin these workshop productions of Emotional Creature in South Africa, as Africa is the heart of the world, and the story of Emotional Creature is about opening and exploding the heart,” says Ensler. “There is the greatest potential for the future in Africa and what happens in Africa will determine what happens to rest of the world. African girls can and will lead that future.”

Through rants, poetry, questions and facts, we come to understand the universality of girls everywhere: their resiliency, their wildness, their pain, their fears, their secrets and their triumphs. I Am an Emotional Creature is a call, a reckoning, an education, an act of empowerment for girls, and an illumination for parents and for us all.

Who should see this play? Parents, teachers, girls and boys, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins – in short - everyone. Compelling, confrontational and uncompromisingly true to the voices of girls worldwide, I Am an Emotional Creature is a ground-breaking work that will open your eyes and ears to what girls are thinking and feeling – and how they view the world we’re living in. In a world where young girls are so often trained to mute their voices, play down their emotions and moderate their tone, I Am an Emotional Creature is an important demonstration of what’s going on in the raging hearts of the emotional creature that is the girl-child.

As the latest addition to the V-Day movement, I Am an Emotional Creature has become part of an impressive set of woman-focused initiatives that Eve Ensler has pioneered, amongst them the famed The Vagina Monologues, and more recently, the establishment of City of Joy, a revolutionary new community for women survivors of gender violence in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). There is little doubt that the play will have a dramatic and positive impact on South African audiences, offering an inspiring, thought-provoking experience, and most importantly, prompting a change in the way we regard and respond to the girls of this world and to the girls inside all of us, men and boys and women, too.