Isabella Rossellini Brings GREEN PORNO to World Cafe Live

1. Isabella Rosselini, GREEN PORNO live poster

Internationally renowned actress, model, and activist Isabella Rossellini comes to Philadelphia’s World Café Live on November 14, for a one-night run of her delightfully naughty one-woman show GREEN PORNO. Following the Philadelphia performance, the production travels to Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Music Hall on November 21, a co-presentation of The Warhol and Carnegie Museums of Art & Natural History. The live 75-minute touring piece is adapted for the theater from a series of short films on the mating rituals of insects, animals, and marine life that Rossellini conceived, wrote, directed, and starred in, which aired on The Sundance Channel in 2008-09.

Inspired by her love of animals and her concerns about the unsound environmental practices that could compromise their survival, Rossellini’s well-researched work, based on a text by French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, is designed to be both funny and educational. Using the format of a biology-class lecture with projected illustrations, colorful costumes, and cartoonish props (including cardboard cut-outs and foam-rubber sculptures), the actress synthesizes art and science in a uniquely comical, often kinky, and sometimes scandalous examination of biodiversity through the unusual sexual and parental behaviors of hamsters, seahorses, snails, bees, earthworms, and more.

Isabella Rossellini portrays a snail in GREEN PORNO (Photo credit: Mario del Curto)
Isabella Rossellini portrays a snail in GREEN PORNO (Photo credit: Mario del Curto)

The daughter of Oscar-winning Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman and Italian film director Roberto Rossellini, Isabella Rossellini is best known for her break-out performance as an abused nightclub singer in the David Lynch cult-classic film Blue Velvet (1986) and as the face of Lancôme cosmetics (1982-96). Among her philanthropic activities, she has served as a Board member of the Wildlife Conservation Network, as President and Director of the Howard Gilman Foundation, and has held affiliations with both the Central Park Conservancy and UNICEF.

If you’ve ever wondered how wildlife copulates, masturbates, and procreates, GREEN PORNO will answer your questions with real facts and true wit; you might even see in it some of the same natural diversity that exists within our own human species. Doors open at 6:30, so you can grab a drink and a bite (preferably vegetarian!) before the 8:00 curtain. [World Cafe Live, 3025 Walnut Street] November 14, 2014; worldcafelive.com.

  • Watch “Hamsters”, an episode from Rossellini’s GREEN PORNO series

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