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by Isabella Rossellini & Jean-Claude Carrière, directed by Muriel Mayette

Les Visiteurs du Soir, Winter Garden Theatre, Toronto

June 6-8, 2014

Rossellini: “Biology is the greatest show on Earth”

A survey of the audience of Green Porno would likely show that the majority, if not all, had not come to learn about the sex lives of animals but to simply to be in the presence of Isabella Rossellini, the closest now to being in the presence of her mother Ingrid Bergman.  Rossellini is well aware of this, and in performing Green Porno she is consciously using her fame to cause us to see her in a different light.  We know her as a glamorous model and serious movie star, but Green Porno reveals her as a serious ecologist and a clown with a very dry wit. 

Numerous movie stars will say they are concerned about the environment, but Rossellini, who has always loved animals, decided to go back to university to get a master’s degree in biology.  Knowing this, Robert Redford asked her if she would do three short films about the diversity of sexual practices in the animal kingdom.  She came up with three shorts with the title Green Porno that she designed, directed and starred in that were so successful when first shown on his Sundance Channel on the web in 2008, that she went to make a total of eighteen, followed by two sequels – Seduce Me in 2010 and Mammas in 2013.        

In 2013 she decided to turn the web series into a stage show and had famed French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière – known for That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), Belle de Jour (1967), Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) and  The Tin Drum (1979) – write her script.  Rossellini premiered the show in French at the Printemps des Comédiens in Montpellier in June 2013 under the title Bestiare d’amour since which time it has been travelling the globe given mostly in the English translation by Sofia Groopman.

The show is not so much theatre as an illustrated lecture with excerpts from the Green Porno web series providing the video illustrations.  The fun is that the Green Porno series, while being scientifically accurate, does not consist of documentary footage but rather of Rossellini herself as if in a children’s show portraying various animals in immensely creative costumes and a décor made of paper and cardboard talking about various types of reproduction as her character – be it Mantis, Snail or Limpet – experiences it. 

The conceit of the show is that we have been invited to a “conference” to hear Rossellini speak about sexual diversity in the animal kingdom.  The stage is bare except for a lectern and a large screen for projections above the lectern.  Rossellini enters in a long-sleeved, floor-to-neck-length black gown that gives the appearance of an academic gown.  She enters carrying two bouquets – one of various grains, one of flowers.  Her first rhetorical question is which of these two bouquets would we give as a present.  We could give the flowers of course because they are so colourful, but why is that?  Flowers reproduce with the aid of insects and use colour as a means of attracting them.  Grains, on the other hands, reproduce by means of the wind and thus have no need to be seductive. 

This introduction allows Rossellini to segue into her strictly structured lecture surveying animal reproduction from the most primitive organisms to the more sophisticated, from asexual to sexual reproduction.  As with the Green Porno series, all her science has been confirmed by other scientists.  What is so amusing are Rossellini’s efforts in the guise of an academic to find metaphors we can relate to or to illustrate the various eccentricities she discusses.  While the Green Porno videos are very funny, they are used rather too often.  We haven’t r

eally come to the theatre to watch excerpts of a web series and Rossellini’s onstage antics, as when she delivers philosophical remarks about biology while dressed in a hamster suit, are what give her lecture what little theatricality it has.      

Rossellini first deals with male and female sea urchins that merely spray genetic material into the sea with the goal that some of the sperm and eggs may link up and make new sea urchins.  This leads to a discussion of types of animals that have no specialized reproductive organs, like certain fish that are mouthbrooders.  The female produces eggs and then takes them in her mouth.  The male has to aim his spray of sperm so that it will fertilize the eggs.  To illustrate this, Rossellini takes a box of cherry tomatoes and tells us to imagine they are eggs.  Then she takes a cardboard fish representing the male, trying to talk with tomatoes in her mouth, and squirts a hidden bottle of Silly String all over her face.  Completely deadpan, she picks the Silly String off her face ready to move on to the next scientific demonstration.

The convergence of Rossellini’s earnest delivery, scientific fact and her imaginative illustrations of it make the 75-minute-long lecture a delight from first to last.  In a discussion of which animal has the longest penis in relation to body size, she announces it is the barnacle.  Fixed as it is permanently in one spot it has to have a penis long enough to reach whatever female barnacle may be in the vicinity, a point she illustrates by gradually pulling out a metal tape measure until is extends into the wings. 

Though humour is the main tone of the evening, even those who habitually watch nature programmes on television will learn some unusual facts.  We all know that if a starfish loses a leg it can regrow it.  But did you know that some starfish reproduce by fission, deliberately severing a leg so that it will grow into a new starfish?  Rossellini comments how handy this would be for career women to clone themselves, one self to cook and take care of children, the other to throw herself more fully into her vocation. 

After covering sexual reproduction, Rossellini moves on to cover sexual activity not related to reproduction.   Here she notes that homosexual behaviour has been observed in the common deer, with young velvet antlered bucks mounting each other and older bucks mounting the velvet-antlered bucks.  But for her, bottle-nosed dolphins, the sea creatures with a brain closest in size to humans, engage in the wildest non-reproductive sexual activity, where one basically sticks any protruding part of itself into any orifice of another, when not masturbating.   

She notes that homosexuality was once taught to be “against nature”, but as she demonstrates nature has more examples of unusual behaviour than we can imagine.  In one pointed segment on video, she shows Noah trying to fill his ark: “There went in two by two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had commanded Noah” (Genesis 7:9).  In the video, however, there is a thunderclap and a threatening hand points from the clouds when some animals not in couples try to board the ark.  The earthworm wants to go in solo – because it is a hermaphrodite.  The aphids want go in a group – because they reproduce by parthenogenesis and thus are all genetically identical. 

At this point Rossellini’s lecture which has been about biodiversity takes a turn and becomes a statement about the importance of diversity of every kind, sexual or not, on earth.  Nature is about diversity and any attempt to decrease diversity is a threat.  As Rossellini points out we judge the world around us based on our five senses, but other animals in the world have senses we do not – ultraviolet sight, subsonic hearing, perception of magnetic waves.  Human beings cannot know the whole story since we cannot fully perceive it and therefore are in no position to judge what should or should not exist. 

In this sly, subtle manner, Rossellini’s earnest clown-slow about biodiversity leaves us with much more to ponder than Rossellini’s own charm and sense of humour.  She ultimately asks us to take a humbler view of ourselves and question what our mastery of the earth has really achieved.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Isabella Rossellini as a Hamster, ©2013 Les Visiteurs du Soir; Isabella Rossellini as the Limpet, Crepidula fornicata, ©2008 Sundance Channel.

For tickets, visit http://luminatofestival.com.