Photo by David Hawe.
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre presents
The Silicone Diaries
Created and performed by Nina Arsenault
Directed by Brendan Healy
Dramaturgy by Judith Rudakoff
November 25 – December 11 @ Buddies in Bad Times
By Jen Handley
“What do you say to God if you die during plastic surgery?” asks Nina Arsenault as she leans back in a white plastic chair. She pauses just a second before finishing the sentence—“that you paid for by jerking off online?” Arsenault, a transgendered writer and performer, opened her remount (see last year’s review here) of The Silicone Diaries last week at Buddies in Bad Times. The play consists mostly of Arsenault talking directly to the audience as she tells the story of her life and transformation.
Nina Arsenault’s beauty characterizes her life so much that it’s impossible to talk about her without describing what she looks like. She is rail thin and stands well over six feet tall in stilettos, with a magnificently curvy torso and honey-blonde hair so huge it looks almost weightless— the only other place I’ve only ever seen her silhouette is animated Disney movies. She begins the show with a couple of anecdotes about her boyhood in a trailer park north of Toronto, during one of which she looks up at a Zellers mannequin in joyful recognition of something inside herself. But after making this with the impersonal perfection of the mannequin, Arsenault spends the next ninety minutes exploring the very human emotions and experiences of someone who manages to look, well, better than human. (She sometimes jokingly calls herself a transsexual cyborg.)
Perhaps then it’s needless to say that Arsenault has spent a lot of her adult life being stared at, and The Silicone Diaries deals as much with her perceptions of how other people perceive her as it does her own beliefs about herself. In Arsenault’s description of her work as a webcam chat partner at Video Secret (“which is neither video, nor a secret,” says Arsenault with the deadpan frankness she maintains for most sexual references throughout the show) she explains how she felt sexy because she saw herself as the person her chat partners were seeing her as, in grayscale, “an Andy Warhol silk-screen” of her (still male-featured) self. This leads into a casually brilliant metaphor as the “phallic column” of chat partners shrink away after she altered the settings on her webcam to show her face in stark reality. In fact for someone who aspires to godessness, Arsenault layers her hard-earned self-love with moments of extreme humility. The climax of the play, when she describes being hit on by Tommy Lee, brings Arsenault to the most watched she has ever been in her life, and turns out to be not the extended name-drop you might expect but an illustration of self-consciousness.
Arsenault drops the odd sassy one-liner, which seemed like one of the few things the audience was prepared for: we laughed when she described a group of rude women as looking like “off-duty Hooters waitresses,” and we laughed even more when she said, “I don’t usually allow myself to judge people like that, but the Ativan had lowered so many of my inhibitions. Also, it was a fact.” These judging moments are rare, though. The Silicone Diaries isn’t about exploring her culture but about exploring herself; for the most part, she leaves it to the audience make the make the connection between her experiences and their lives.
It’s interesting to me that many of us find women who have surgical enhancements to be very plastic, fake-looking, and somewhat repellent; but when we find a woman who has transformed her gender with an even more extensive battery of surgical enhancements, we celebrate her newfound beauty.
That sounded snide. I didn’t mean it to be. Just an observation, and I guess an implied question: Does a plastic surgery patient’s attractiveness depend on their reasons for their surgery?