(the following review excerpted from www.torontoist.com.)

Transgendered performer Nina Arsenault, who’s undergone sixty plastic surgeries to attain an idealized female body, seized the role of a lifetime when she was offered the chance to personify Mattel’s Barbie for the doll’s fiftieth anniversary party, during Fashion Week 2009. Arsenault’s description of the surreal night she spent mingling (as Barbie) with fashion and celebrity elites is devastatingly candid as she describes floating through the evening in a haze of wish fulfillment and Ativan tranquilizers, dealing with ego bruising and eye-opening encounters (most notably with TV personality Ben Mulroney, whom she implies has disappeared into his Ken doll–like shell). The highlights of the show are her observations of how partygoers reacted when she approached them and offered them cupcakes: a potentially humiliating experience that Arsenault subverts into a rapturously spiritual one—the baked treats almost become pop culture communion wafers. The most revealing moment is when she sits on the floor, becoming truly vulnerable for the first time, and we realize what a prodigious effort has gone into maintaining the various doll-inspired poses she’s been striking. SF

Cut and paste the following link to read all of their reviews

http://torontoist.com/2010/08/your_cheat_sheet_to_summerworks_2010.php#barbie

(the following review is excerpted from Ms. Slotkin’s radio coverage of the Summerworks theatre festival.)

“Ms. Arsenault is fascinating… The show is full of caustic wit, perception, barbed observations… I love being unsettled by Ms. Arsenault as she is a woman who idealizes a plastic creation but wants to be taken seriously as a human being, as a living person… one of my recommendations.”

To hear Ms. Slotkin’s full coverage of Summerworks cut and paste the following link:

http://www.lynnslotkin.com/radioreviews.html

(the following text is excerpted from Nestruck’s larger review of the Summerworks festival.)

I was also enthralled by transgendered actor Nina Arsenault’s I Was Barbie, her true story about playing the famous doll at a gala in the toy’s honour held in Toronto. Through a haze of Ativan and champagne, she gives us a penetrating peek behind the scenes at a party full of models, fashion journalists, rappers and Ben Mulroney – it’s gonzo journalism that would make Hunter S. Thompson proud.

to read the entire article cut and paste the link:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/theatre/nestruck-on-theatre/turn-your-attention-away-from-homegrown-at-summerworks/article1671512/

Hunter S. Thompson

You Can Tell It’s Mattel. It’s Swell!
(by Amanda Campbell)

Nina Arsenault, “boy, girl, man, woman, performance artist, academic, educator, reality TV star, stripper, whore, columnist, nightlife hostess, storyteller, aesthete, art object, cyborg, icon, Barbie” is a fascinating human being and, in her newest work i was BARBIE, currently playing at the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace as part of the 2010 SummerWorks Festival, she is an immediately captivating performing subject. In this one woman show Arsenault speaks about her stint playing Barbie at Canadian Fashion Week for the debut of a new Barbie-inspired fashion line in celebration of the iconic doll’s 50th Birthday.

As Arsenault says at the beginning of the piece, the irony of Mattel considering a transgendered performance artist who has become renowned for her ability to transform herself from a seemingly masculine body into a gorgeous and unique work of art is intense to say the least. She also mentions, of course, how ironically appropriate it seemed to her that an individual who has spent thousands of dollars on plastic surgery and who has significant portions of her body created entirely out of silicone, should be chosen to represent a doll who has been accused of “fucking up the body image” of generations worth of women for the past fifty years. And yet, what is perhaps even more fascinating is that the event during Fashion Week, at least on the surface, swept all satire or paradox under the PMS 219 Barbie Pink carpet.

Arsenault is an extremely intellectual artist, and the programme for i was BARBIE is filled with fascinating academic insights with dramaturg Judith Rudakoff into performing identity, the nature of art, beauty and gender and the way that our media and our society constructs gender norms and the way that corporations like Mattel and artists like Andy Warhol, use iconography to perpetuate certain ideals of femininity, beauty and perfection. Yet, the play itself is more subtle in its analysis of this experience, and allows the audience to choose for themselves how deep they would like to delve into the complex issues of gender and identity that Arsenault is weaving. In the programme she says of her writing of this show that “there are stream of consciousness elements in the writing. It moves from a rampant analysis of the things that are happening around me, to a moment of internal reflection about sensation, about something I’m actually feeling in my body.” To truly inhabit Barbie, Arsenault reflects, it is her job for this evening to be vacant (courtesy of Ativan), to be plastic and to be perfect.

While keeping herself poised as the representation of a doll whose image is nearly as complex as her own, Arsenault manages to paint a vivid picture of this event, which is rich in its detail and yet always accessible even to those who didn’t know that Toronto had its own Fashion Week. She mostly takes the audience into her own mind, her own heart and into her breath, which she strives to keep down in her genitals the way her voice teacher advocates, all the while she simultaneously represses and embraces the very real feelings of fear and insecurity that inevitably rise and subside throughout the evening. Yet, she also inhabits a few other individuals instrumental to her journey to Barbie to hilarious effect, as each one is more extreme in her ability to precisely inhabit the Hollywood culture than the last.

There is so much fascinating intellectual territory crammed into this piece that the feminist in me could write an entire paper delving into the subtext of each moment from the way that Arsenault carries herself, the dainty way she holds her wrists and insists on having her hair cover one of her eyes to her allusions to Ghandi, Buddha, Jesus Christ, Michelle Obama and the pink plastic temple of patriarchy, with Barbie as the highest priestess and, most interesting of all, Arsenault’s ability to simultaneously revel within this world, as even her own body, and certainly her deft mind, both celebrates, subverts and rejects everything that Barbie typically stands for.

Director Brendan Healy largely allows Nina Arsenault to be the focus of this piece, both as the storyteller, but also as a Barbie, a gorgeous, perfectly sculptured representation of the female body clad in a silver sequin dress and incredibly high stiletto shoes. She creates art and is the artwork, although there are also projected photos from the event, with Perez Hilton styled captions, as well as commercials for Barbie inter-spliced throughout as well as a good use of the camera shutter, as Arsenault speaks thoughtfully about the mechanics of modelling as a public figure, and musing what her genuine emotions, a feeling like empathy for example, would look like on camera if it accidentally permeated through her meticulously posed facade.

At the heart of i was BARBIE, is that even though Nina Arsenault, like Barbie, can easily spark a discussion about artificiality, as Judith Rudakoff writes, “is Nina a reproduction, a representation, a reflection or a reinterpretations? Perhaps a regeneration? A reinvention?,” as Barbie can change her clothes and reconfigure her image, just as real woman are able to do in the world of Plastic Surgery and Self-Help gurus, ultimately what is inside, the raw emotions, and the heart remain. And what makes i was BARBIE so beautiful is that it is filled with both.

to read their other great reviews cut and paste the link:

http://www.twisitheatreblog.com/search?updated-max=2010-08-10T19%3A51%3A00-03%3A00&max-results=7

(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

“[Wes] Berger, as Cadieux’s brother, also has experience playing sex/gender diversity onstage. His presence in Nina Arsenault’s virtuoso performance Ladylike, another Gilbert script, brought a smouldering sensuality to a small but crucial role.” (Xtra! Magazine, Apr 08, 2010)

Wes and I worked on Ladylike together in the summer of 2008 for the Toronto Fringe Festival. This article is about a new Sky Gilbert play he is working on, Reconciliation, which opens on Thursday at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.

To check out the whole article about Reconciliation which stars Wes copy and paste this address:

http://www.xtra.ca/public/Toronto/Theatre_preview_Reconciliation-8470.aspx

a video trailer for my one woman play The Silicone Diaries…

REVIEW: The Silicone Diaries
By Kerry Freek
(originally posted on November 19, 2009)

Nina Arsenault is fishy.

As she slinks onto the stage, squirming and gyrating like a feline Barbarella, the audience is drawn to her hyper-feminine figure, perfected with over sixty cosmetic surgeries and suitably wrapped in a plastic tube dress.

In tranny terms, she explains, “fishy” means to excel at being a woman. But Arsenault is something beyond an ideal version of a woman. She looks like a living, breathing mannequin.

She begins the Diaries by recounting her childhood in Beamsville, Ontario. A group of young boys burn holes in the eyes of the women in girlie magazines. They tear up the pictures, and Arsenault, as a young boy, watches the shreds fall to the ground, thinking “these aren’t women; they are goddesses.” The Diaries become the narrative of her struggle — how to restructure these torn pieces of herself into her ideal form, a Venus, or “a superhero drawing of my body.”
Remarkable legs, hair, and makeup aside, Arsenault has a captivating presence that is complemented by a well-written, intelligent script. She’s an expert flirt, navigating her stories of self-actualization — including bouts with internet porn, black market injections, and surgeries gone wrong — with flair and temperance. One particular tale stands out — a triumphant (yet Ativan-hazed) moment involving rocker Tommy Lee. In this scene, Arsenault is at once confident, crumpled, and classy, and it makes for great theatre and a very human moment.

Unfortunately, while her timing is pretty decent throughout, Arsenault fumbles a few times, losing her momentum here and there. To her credit, it doesn’t take long to lull the audience back under her long-lashed gaze. She has a great sense of storytelling and she understands that the show’s success lies in its relatability. Everyone, tranny or homo or straight or black or white, has at one time or another struggled with identity and self acceptance. Arsenault commands attention without overacting, and, even in her most confident moments, maintains a sense of humility — that’s her real power. Despite her see-through dress, cartoonish breasts, and fishy, silicone-pumped hips, she is one of us.

http://www.mondomagazine.net/2009/review-the-silicone-diaries/

My top 10 productions of the year (give or take a couple)
by J. Keely Nestruck
(originally published Tuesday, December 29, 2009 4:21 PM)

‘Tis the season for lists, round-ups and starting blog posts with the words “’tis the season”. I’ve already written about the theatrical year in review and my five favourite new Canadian plays (scroll down). But because we have 10 fingers and 10 toes, we must also make lists of 10 – so here are my 10 favourite productions of 2009 in no particular order:

(for the rest of the list cut and paste the link below.)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/theatre/my-top-10-productions-of-the-year-give-or-take-a-couple/article1414247/

(by Aurora Stewart de Pena)

Nina Arsenault, I think, is 6 foot 2. She has tumbling red hair that tangles above her shoulders, a perfect waspy ski-jump nose and too-green green eyes. The roundest hips, the longest legs, the smallest waist, the thinnest wrists, the fullest breasts. She has had over 60 cosmetic surgeries.

She looks like Jessica Rabbit and I am a little bit afraid of her.

She discusses, in The Silicone Diaries, how she came to be this way; the passion that drove her to create this perfect, surreal, intimidating woman.

This is not necessarily a piece about making the transition from man to woman. Arsenault did make that transition, but this is nothing so elementary. She instead reveals through her impeccably performed monologues that as long as she has known what she thought was beautiful she has sped toward achieving it with athletic focus. It is her obsession. Of course I’m obsessed with beauty, too. I’m a woman and I live in North America, and in the darkest parts of my heart where I keep the fear that I may be a bad person and all of the vicious things I’ve ever thought is the belief that my value is equal to my looks, be they good or bad. My brain and my politics would argue, but I have so many nightmares about disfigurement that it’s ridiculous to pretend these things don’t matter to me.

A sexist society created the idea that though beauty was a requirement for a woman’s success, it was a shallow and frivolous thing to pursue. This is a particularly Western shame, and throughout the course of the show Arsenault compares herself to a Geisha, a type of woman she believes is respected for her dedication to beauty at all costs. Here, the men in charge feel a deep guilt for being aroused by beauty in all of its arresting power and not by puritan-valued wifely qualities like compassion, sweetness or warmth.

If this idea is changing, and I believe it is, Arsenault is at the front line. It was wonderful to discover, throughout the course of this remarkable show, that the woman so initially intimidating to me is open, honest, funny and brilliant. Yes, there´s more…. »