Isabella Rossellini in “Green Porno”REBECCA GREENFIELDEarly on in Isabella Rossellini’s “Green Porno,” a one-woman show about the varieties of sexual experience found in nature, the actress and former model makes the surprising assertion that what she presents is not pornographic, but rather, obscene. After all, she told the audience at New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music last week (January 25), “I don’t know what you like.”
Obscenity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and there are instances of both to be found in “Green Porno,” which Rossellini cowrote with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. For the former, consider the hamster. Rossellini dramatizes the mother hamster’s tendency to devour the weak among her brood—to recoup proteins and other vital nutrients she lost during childbirth—by wearing prison stripes and invoking the hamster as a defense of infanticide in one of the show’s many short films.
In another, Rossellini plays a male praying mantis mounting a female, which turns and bites off the actress’s head. In the video, as in nature, the male thrusts gamely on even after he has been decapitated. The show also features duck gang rape, sadomasochistic snails, fish orgies, ...
