Robert Cushman: The Silicone Diaries brings a sex change to the stage
Robert Cushman, National Post · Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2010
http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/Robert+Cushman+Silicone+Diaries+brings+change+stage/3913303/story.htmlI've never seen as many people leave the theatre during a performance as I did at the re-opening of The Silicone Diaries. (The show, a hit in Buddies in Bad Times' cabaret room last season, is back for a run in the main space.) Their discomfort was, I'm fairly sure, physical rather than aesthetic, since the performance itself is a remarkable one. It's a transsexual's detailed account of her journey from a male body to a female one, and it includes extensive film footage of plastic surgery, both bodily and facial, as well as extensive verbal descriptions. The protagonist's trajectory was, in a sense, reversed by those in the audience who took early retirement: in the show's first half, the evacuees were women, in the second, as the story threatened to cut closer to home so to speak, they were men.
