Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno at the Playhouse

We all have our indelible Isabella Rossellini film memory: as the wounded nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens in David Lynch's Blue Velvet; as Laura, the uncomprehending wife of Jeff Bridges's plane crash survivor in Fearless; as glass leg-wearing beer heiress Lady Helen Port-Huntley in Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World. Last night many of us shared these memories as we gathered at the Vancouver Playhouse to take in the live stage version of Rossellini's Green Porno, a one-woman show about the sex lives of animals that was being presented by the PuSh Festival in partnership with Vancouver's Italian Cultural Centre.

Green Porno is based on the wildly successful series of short films that Rossellini began making for Robert Redford's Sundance television station in 2008 (and now widely available on the web). As Rossellini tells us early on in the show, growing up in Rome the child of film royalty (she is the daughter of the legendary Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman and Italian neo-realist director Roberto Rossellini) she always harboured a love of animals and nature, studying biology at university. When, however, she began modelling for cosmetics giant Lancome and then making films, she put this passion aside. It was reawakened when she re-enrolled in university later in her career, and Green Porno, which is modelled as a lecture-performance, suggests not just that Rossellini is an excellent student, but would also make an amazing professor--the kind of lecturer who could combine her natural charisma with a knack for conveying scientific material in an hilariously accessible way, all accompanied by an abundant and sophisticated use of media technology.

The films that make up Rossellini's original Green Porno series are all focused around sexual reproduction in the animal world. They are so fun to watch because they combine strange facts about the abundant diversity of conjugality across species with a DIY production aesthetic, with Rossellini dressed up in felt, cardboard, or papier-mache costumes (as, for example, an earthworm, or a hamster, or a duck), speaking directly to the camera against a flat, two-dimensional backdrop. A similar aesthetic governs the live theatrical show, with Rossellini making use of a series of crude props she withdraws from the lectern positioned centre stage to illustrate several of her points, before tossing them aside. She also makes two costume changes--first removing her long black shift and donning a fake moustache and tie to make a point about animal transgenderism, and later donning a big furry hamster costume, replete with outsize whiskers. The latter is the same costume she wears in the film clip that precedes this reveal, in which she notes whereas among hamsters it is common for mothers to eat the weakest of their young in order to preserve their energy and attention for the heartiest among their broods, among humans infanticide is morally reprehensible and punishable by imprisonment.

Because the above is delivered with such winking charm, we are wont to gloss over the explicitly feminist point Rossellini is making (and she is particularly adept at skewering stereotypes about female sexual passivity and the so-called maternal instinct throughout the show). Indeed one of the rich rewards of this show for me is just how slyly political it is, with discussions of animal homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, and polyamory putting the lie to the claim, among segments of the human population, that such things are simply "against nature." As Rossellini points out in a way that is both intellectually well-informed and humourously entertaining (not least in her dig against Noah and his arc), animal (and plant) biodiversity is vastly accommodating of all kinds of sexual behaviour and gender identities.

Would that it were the same among us.

P.