It was nice spending some time with Isabella last evening. A very personal and intimate show, filled with good common sense. It was like listening to a tale told amongst friends on a winter night by the fire. Prior to its theater debut, Green Porno was originally lunched as a series of shorts on animal’s sexual habits. The series aired on Sundance Channel since 2008 has been entirely written and directed by Isabella Rosselini.
At the theater, Isabella Rosselini puts on her one-man show, able to play a non-stop succession of roles, even the most absurd ones, but always in a very convincing way.
At first, the topic can make one think about a National Geographic documentary or the likes. Green Porno instead, gives Isabella the possibility to explore a great variety of details on the copulatory rituals of a particular species of amphibian, while at the same time and without digressing, allowing her to make interesting links to her personal life. Through this allegoric canvas which mixes scientific facts on one side and intimate details on the other, Isabella discloses us her world, unwrapping a wonderful universe. Like Alice in Wonderland, she penetrates deep in the meanders of her story, addressing her audience with reminiscent tones tainted by fantastic and human elements at once.
A gifted teacher and an accomplice, she transforms herself in a mantis to introduce the topic of ‘sex at all costs’; using her sexual appetite to turn into a kamikaze while copulating with the female and transforming such persistent sense of duty in an inexplicable call for death.
And again, talking about maternal devotion, she dresses the part of a rare species of spider that gets cannibalised by her offspring to keep them alive. Jumping from one excess to the next, Isabella compares these instincts with the extremely practical nature of female hamsters ready to eat their babies to regain strengthsafter birth.
The audience absorbs a lineup of experience from the sadomasochist nature of snails, which as part of courting, poke each other with special spikes to enhance their power of seduction to the importance of interdependency for some fish of the abyss. From the fears linked to homosexuality, dating back to Noah’s ark,to hermaphrodite choice of some species who prefer to copulate with both sexes, like some calamari, in order to maximise their chances of reproduction.
Funny scenarios built around sex between dolphins for whom ‘everything goes’, through all their orifices, to group rape for ducks; digressing on penises of all shapes and forms fit for different shapes of vaginal species.
Green Porno is most definitely the most entertaining way of studying biology but this one-hour theatermost important merit is that it allows its audience to reflect on what could be a triviality while pondering on the meaning of life. If it is true that as human beings we want to convince ourselves that the meaning of our existence goes beyond just transmitting life; it is equally true that much can be learned on our species by exploring how we do it. The luvvy Isabella succeeds in translating labyrintic vaginal canals and multishaped penises in behavioralfeatures typical of our genres. This perhaps, her biggest merit.
She does not forget her own self and pulls in her family into the act, by sharing her father’s desire to give birth, while comparing him to a sea horse.
The show ends with an homage to Ingrid Bergman, her mother, and once more Isabella proves of her ability to get back into the game, a Darwinian game at that, by concluding with one more great truth: we are all different from each other; but the most interesting fact is that we are still part of the same species.