Getting a long look at Nina Arsenault is a piece of theatre in and of itself. Canada’s most celebrated transsexual has a curvaceous body that’s part Jessica Rabbit, part Grace Jones, all dangerous swerves and angles that meet at points accessible only by plastic surgery or divine intervention. Director Brendan Healy (who is also Buddies’ new Artistic Director) makes a wise choice, then, to stage Arsenault’s one-transsexual show in the intimate backroom of Buddies’ Cabaret. Arsenault’s life’s work is what you see, a living altar to the female form that is unimaginably theatrical.
Though the play’s video projections and dramatic lighting take away from her sardonic storytelling, simplistic staging is all Arsenault needs, as one mere chair becomes an exercise bike, surgery table and resting point for Tommy Lee’s lap. A traumatic and hilarious narrative propels the stories further, chronicling Arsenault’s first look at nudie magazines in a Beamsville trailer park to a voluntary castration surgery in Mexico. Determined to transform herself into what she calls a “living self portrait,” Arsenault endures 60 surgeries, including dangerous black-market silicone injections, where the risk is that the silicone may enter her bloodstream to the point of drowning her.
It’s Arsenault’s brave candor that makes The Silicone Diaries absolutely unforgettable. Her storytelling reads like literary fiction, as she personifies countless transvestites, screen goddesses and lost souls with deliberate poses, her silhouette cat-like and model-esque. (In the play’s funniest and saddest moment, her impression of charming Tommy Lee in Ultra Supper Club is so perfectly poised, you’d think Arsenault were Meryl Streep.) In a story about working the tranny-webcam circuit, she hints at loneliness but strays away from desire, as one imagines that the perfect hourglass figure must come before self-actualization. Poised on a treadmill, wig cast aside in the play’s conclusion, Arsenault tries to break through to her hidden vagina as the stiletto heels clack on the stage. “This is the next stage of my work with my body,” she repeats fiendishly, as we see the scar tissue bubble on her bald head. Don’t miss the opportunity to see Arsenault fall apart as gender builds, breaks and reinvents itself before your eyes.
review by Chandler Levac
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