Second Opinion: Silicone Diaries

(Editor's note: The Charlebois Post encourages its contributors to share opinions even on productions for which reviews have appeared on the site.) 

by Richard Burnett

For audiences outside Toronto, the hometown of Canada’s most celebrated transsexual Nina Arsenault, the thrill of seeing Nina step onstage for the first time is pure voyeurism. This thrill cannot be duplicated with mere videos or photographs. Observing Nina’s body and what she has done to it is a voyeuristic sensation completely rooted in the real. And by god, with her eye-popping 36D-26-40 figure, Nina Arsenault could pose in Penthouse.

Review: The Silicone Diaries

The Art of Artificiality

by David Allan King

It hurts to be beautiful. And in Nina Arsenault's one-woman show The Silicone Diaries, that's both literal and figurative.

After a successful run at Toronto's Buddies In Bad Times Theatre, Arsenault takes the Montreal stage this week for a performance that has captivated critics and earned itself a run in Ottawa's upcoming Magnetic North Theatre Festival (celebrating the cream of the crop in contemporary creation). All rightly so: The Silicone Diaries, written and performed by a transgendered beauty well beyond 'passable', takes on that last bastion of queer theatre we still haven't fully explored: trans, post-op life and culture. And as Arsenault nails it, the notion of a 'woman 'trapped in a man's body' barely scratches the surface of the transgendered experience.

Interview: Nina Arsenault of The Silicone Diaries

by Richard Burnett in Hour (with permission)

It is pure synchronicity that I am blabbing with Nina Arsenault - the most celebrated transsexual in Canada - on international Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day set aside each Nov. 20 to memorialize those murdered because of anti-transgender hatred or prejudice.

Nina, star of her critically-hailed, autobiographical one-transwoman show, The Silicone Diaries, is very aware of this too.

"The hardest part of my transformation was when I was living as a woman but still looked very masculine and people would make fun of me on the street," Nina says. "They'd yell things out of their car. I realized there is a double standard for transsexuals, because if you're a beautiful transsexual, people will accept you more easily. If you 'pass' you will be more accepted. You may not even be noticed. But if you don't pass... That's what really hurt me - people don't see you as human."

Truth is, after 60 cosmetic surgeries over eight long years, Nina doesn't look very human.

Similarly, last winter when I asked famed NYC tranny (and photographer Dave LaChappelle's muse) Amanda Lepore what she thinks she looks like, Lepore replied, "There is something alien about my face - there is something spacey about me. If I dressed like Lady Gaga, [my face] would get lost. But because I dress retro, vamp and classic, the [alien] qualities come out more."

Nina Arsenault is equally frank. "I look like a cyborg," she says, unafraid to showcase her eye-popping 36D-26-40 bombshell body in her first play, the aptlynamed I Was Barbie, which was a hit during Barbie's 50th anniversary at Toronto Fashion Week in June 2009.

But it wasn't always so.