(originally printed in the Toronto Star Aug 7th. This review is excerpted from a series of three reviews of Summerworks shows)
I Was Barbie
Highly Recommended
Created and performed by Nina Arsenault. Directed by Brendan Healy. Until Aug. 15 at Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, 16 Ryerson Ave. 416-504-7529.
There’s another kind of madness on display from Nina Arsenault in her latest dispatch from the front ranks of the transgendered wars, which she calls I Was Barbie.
Arsenault, you may recall, is the former York University acting teacher named Rodney who underwent 60 separate plastic surgeries to turn into the modern Circe of amorphous sexuality that she is today. Her story of that event, The Silicone Diaries, was one of the major events of last season and is scheduled to be revived at Buddies in Bad Times this fall.
I Was Barbie, however, shows Arsenault in a different mode. She has only one story to tell: about how she played Barbie during 2009′s Toronto Fashion Week to celebrate the plastic plaything’s 50th birthday.
Arsenault’s search for the perfect female face and body at all costs makes her arrival as Barbie that night a kind of journey to the peak of the K2 of a certain kind of gender reality, and she savours the moment with all of its ironies.
She wafts through the night on a cloud of Ativan, but it doesn’t dull her razor-sharp perceptions. She’s devastating about the alcohol-fueled performance of Fashion Week head Robin Kay and equally cutting (in a you-don’t-feel-the-pain-you-just-see-the-blood way) eviscerating Ben Mulroney, all but declaring him the perfect Ken to her Barbie.
But although she names names and juliennes reputations, she also turns the high beams on her own persona, sending herself up as “a kind of high-maintenance Gandhi.”
When she decides that the phalanx of “young men I knew from the clubs” who now show up dressed in black and wearing microphone headsets makes the evening look “the gayest episode of Battlestar Galactica ever,” you have no choice but to succumb in laughter.
Arsenault is a sphinx with many secrets. You can’t take her eyes off her when she’s on stage, which is one sure definition of stardom.
She’s still haunted by the erratic way she often links things together that slightly hazed the glory of The Silicone Diaries. Is Arsenault searching for her lines, puzzling over the right tone, or still working through the Ativan?
No matter, it’s another piece of must-see Summerworks viewing.
Cut and paste the following link to read the other reviews:
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/theatre/article/845151–portrait-of-jealousy-a-summerworks-winner