Isabella Rossellini serves up obscenity and big laughs in Green Porno, Live on Stage

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      Written by Isabella Rossellini and Jean-Claude Carriere. A PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and Italian Cultural Centre presentation. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Saturday, April 25

      Whether wielding a yellow tape measure to demonstrate animal penis lengths or re-enacting fish fertilization by using cherry tomatoes and a squirting paper puppet, Isabella Rossellini proved herself a capable comedian on Saturday night.

      Acting a bit like the world's best biology prof, Rossellini had her adoring fans in stitches for most of her entertaining monologue about the wild kingdom's crudest sex habits.

      Green Porno, Live on Stage is a spinoff of her cult web series, Sundance Channel shorts that mix low-tech props and goofy animal costumes with strange mating facts. She screens a few of those video segments in the live version—an even more successful venture because it allows the charismatic actor to personalize the subject matter and unleash her considerable skills at both droll one-liners and physical humour.

      "It is not pornographic," Rossellini, a masters student in animal ethology, promised in her introduction to the show. "But it is obscene." And some of the facts she presented truly defy imagination—and good taste. Think perma-horny dolphins that don't discern between orifices or ducks that gang rape. What makes it all so fun is that Rossellini is such a good actress that she can convince you she is, say, a hamster nonchalantly gobbling the runt of the litter as easily as a snail getting off on the jabs of a courting male. ("Sadomasochism excites me," she said, and you wondered if there was a little bit of Blue Velvet's Dorothy Vallens in her tone.)

      But the show resonates beyond its weird-but-true facts. Beneath her demonstrations, there are ideas about gender and sexuality that challenge human prejudices. "Chastity and self-sacrifice do not define females," she argues, pointing to chimpanzees and hamsters. And she makes it clear being transgender or homosexual does not "go against nature". One of her strongest illustrations makes fun of the legend of Noah's ark separating animals into male and female pairs; where does the hermaphrodite worm fit in?

      But perhaps the most moving and candid parts of the show come when Rossellini applies science to her own life. In a projected photo, she points out her own father, famed Italian director Roberto Rossellini, cuddling up to his young children in a markedly maternal way. In another, she shows a luminous portrait of star Ingrid Bergman, revealing she's lived with people telling her that her mother is "better than me". But she has resolved that with the knowledge that each generation evolves from the previous one.

      It is almost impossible to imagine anyone else pulling this material off—and you can't write the show's success off to sheer star power. Make no mistake that Rossellini is dead serious about the science in this show, but what disarms you is that she refuses to take herself seriously. Look no further than the silly costumes and the way she litters the floor with discarded stuffy animals, flowers, and paper cutouts.

      Word has it she's working on a new monologue; let's hope the next evolution crawls, slithers, and humps its way to Vancouver too.

      Follow Janet Smith on Twitter @janetsmitharts.

      Comments

      1 Comments

      out at night

      Apr 26, 2015 at 1:28pm

      Such an amazing person. Just that voice alone is enough to make me swoon.