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Culture Stage

Green Porno, Live On Stage

GREEN PORNO, LIVE ON STAGE by Isabella Rossellini and Jean-Claude Carriere (Luminato). At the Winter Garden (189 Yonge). Saturday (June 7) at 8 pm, Sunday (June 8) at 2 pm. $45-$85. 416-368-4849, luminatofestival.com Rating: NNNN


In her quarter century of work as a model and actor, Isabella Rossellini has likely donned some outlandish outfits and costumes. But nothing compares to her dressing up as a furry hamster, slimy snail or self-sacrificing spider for Green Porno, her informative and entertaining lecture about the birds and the bees.

Standing at a lectern for her 70-minute show, which helps kick off the eclectic theatre and performance component of this year’s Luminato Festival, Rossellini explains that she’s always had an interest in biology. Then, a few years ago, she went back to school to study animal behaviour and conservation. As a result she produced a series of short films and presumably out of those grew this show.

The information itself is nothing you couldn’t find on the Discovery Channel, where in fact some sections have previously appeared. Rossellini introduces us to hermaphroditic worms, or creatures that can change sex, or about the seahorse, whose males bear children.

But the pleasure of Green Porno is not what Rossellini tells us, but what she shows us, using props, slides and her playfully colourful movies. Pretending to be some fish who stores her eggs in her mouth, she pops cherry tomatoes in, then holds up a puppet of a male fish that proceeds to squirt semen over her face.

Wondering how some creatures can sometimes eat their young, she shows us a witty short in which she plays a mama hamster who gives birth and then uses the rules of natural selection to justify putting a couple of kids into her mouth.

In one of the most vivid films, she plays a female duck who’s practically gang raped but has a labyrinth-like reproductive system whereby she can choose whose sperm gets to fertilize her eggs.

Of course, there’s more to the show than a series of facts. A section on how the starfish can lop off a limb to make copies of itself makes Rossellini reflect on the difficulties of being a mother with a career, and how she’d love to be able to produce more Isabellas to work, do chores, be with her husband and perhaps even satisfy a lover.

And in demonstrating how things like homosexuality, transvestitism and transsexuality all exist in the natural world, she’s suggesting the accepted male/female model is limited. (One of the most clever sequences features her reenacting Noah’s arc with creatures who don’t follow this model.)

The lighting design and video elements are rich, but the show could be more artfully structured, and there could be a more compelling through-line involving her personal story. She does tell anecdotes about her famous mother (actor Ingrid Bergman) and father (director Roberto Rossellini), but they aren’t always well-integrated.

Still, the show is a witty and thoughtful look at the nature’s biodiversity. And how apropos that it’s being performed in the lush and foliage-filled Winter Garden, where Rossellini’s libidinous creatures feel right at home.

glenns@nowtoronto.com | @glennsumi

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