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The Silicone Diaries

• Created and performed by Nina Arsenault
• Directed by Brendan Healy
• At Buddies in Bad Times in Toronto

The Silicone Diaries isn't the story of a man who wants to be a woman. It's about a boy who wants to grow up to become a mannequin - and who risks life and limb, illegal silicone injections and endless plastic surgery procedures, to realize a dream of fake, perfect, feminine beauty. And it's all true.

Transsexual writer and star Nina Arsenault became a minor celebrity for an incident at Toronto's Ultra Supper Club where she ended up sitting on the lap of an unwitting Tommy Lee doing tequila shots. Arsenault plays that out in full in her autobiographical show, but the event turns out to be as tense and emotional as it is comical. She also digs into unsettling questions about modern male sexuality. What does it mean that Pamela Anderson's ex was attracted to her? "Pamela is a caricature of a woman. And I am a caricature of her."

With real-life characters like a plastic surgeon whose motto is, "Give me a girl - I'll scrape the man right off her face" and a Mexican transsexual who obsessively alters herself to death, you have to stop yourself every so often to recall this isn't science fiction.

Arsenault is not a polished actor and her play is episodic and arrhythmic, but the evening remains riveting, disorientingly repellent and attractive all at once.

The final scene is positively hypnotic, as Arsenault discovers that she barely inhabits the body she has created over dozens of procedures. Her mind sees her dream in the mirror, but her body feels like it has been getting into a car accident over and over.

Through physical exercise and meditation, Nina seeks to connect the two - and finds something resembling true self-acceptance for the first time. You may wonder whether she should have tried the treadmill before the scalpel, but suspend judgment and you may find something resoundingly familiar in Nina's struggle to match her interior and exterior and her discovery of what is mutable and what will never be.

The Silicone Diaries runs through Sunday night.