Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno at the Brooklyn Academy of Music

Have you seen Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno on Sundance Channel? This is not one of the characters in the program.

This is.

We recently had a chance to see Rossellini do Green Porno at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, one of the city's premier locations for the performing arts.  Jean had a scheduling conflict, so Valerie went alone.   Her report:

I was surprised and delighted at every turn by the stage version of Green Porno, which is actually an amalgam of three separate but intertwined series Rossellini did for Sundance:  Green Porno, Seduce Me ("the spawn of Green Porno"), and Mammas.  Several of the video episodes, none longer than five minutes, are included in the program, and Rossellini is the glue that holds them all together, introducing them, adding new material, and subtly weaving all the pieces into a whole that is entertaining, creative, informative, and (gasp!) all factual.

For the most part, it is impossible to reproduce Andy Byers' amazing costumes and sets for the live performance, but it doesn't matter. Rossellini is simultaneously comical and compelling, whether or not she's dressed as an earthworm or a salmon.   (And besides, you can see the costumes and sets in the videos.)

Rossellini enters with a bouquet in each hand - a plain one and a beautiful one, using each as a metaphor for sexual attraction (which would you choose?), and when she's done with them, tosses them on the floor as if they were candy wrappers.  By the end of the evening, she is surrounded by discarded props (which I was not allowed to photograph, even once the show was over.  This photo borrowed from Edge on the Net.)

During the course of the evening, we get a wonderful discourse on the varieties of animal sex, starting with sea urchin sex ("the encounter of two clouds" in water [clouds of eggs and clouds of sperm], starfish sex (simply disengage an arm or leg, thus cloning yourself so you can "have a career and home life") and mouth-breeder sex, which she demonstrates with hilarious props.

For our first video, we are treated to snail sex.  Rossellini's choices are by no means random - snails are chosen because they are hermaphrodites, and, she points out, sadomasochists (well, by her interpretation, anyway).

Click on this link to see the full video, which lasts less than two minutes. Rossellini researches, writes, directs and stars in all the videos, and revised it for the stage.

We learn that, inch for inch, the blue whale has the World's Largest Penis, weighing (?) in at nine feet long.  But everything is relative, and in ratios of body size to penis size, the immobile barnacle is the clear winner.  To demonstrate this, Rossellini brings out a carpenter's tape measure (this photo from Huffington Post)

saying it's like opening a window and "making love next door".  Her point made, she flings the tape measure to the floor with the other rejected props.

About half way through the show, Rossellini removes her pearls and long black dress to reveal a shirt, tie and pants underneath.  She applies a mustache to her upper lip,  and runs her video on limpets, sequential hermaphrodites. Here is Rossellini as the female limpet, with male limpets (who will transition in turn to female) stacked on top of her.

We learn about dolphins (who have fin sex and blow hole sex and lots of other kinds too),






and anglerfish (a female shown here with her tiny fused mate)

and the infamous praying mantis.





For her final act, while we are all engrossed in a video, Rossellini changes onstage into one of her costumes, and becomes, in her words, an amster.   With reading glasses.

Wait till you see the video on amsters, from her series Mammas.




Want to know more about the series?  Click here for Behind the Scenes of Season 2, or here for an interview with Rossellini herself on her brainchild.  There are annoying pop-ups and brief commercials, but it's worth it. Sundance has kindly put all the videos from the three series on their website for viewing on demand. Didn't get to see the live performance? Didn't see it when it originally aired? Don't have a tv? See it online!

Isabella Rossellini is further proof that women of a certain age rock!