Luminato 2014: Green Porno Leaves Audience Satisfied

Well, it’s safe to say I’ll never look at a plate of escargot the same way again. Or a dragonfly. Or Flipper.

Isabella Rossellini – actress, model, filmmaker – kicked off opening night of the 2014 Luminato Festival in Toronto with the Canadian premiere of her inventive, biologically-themed stage play Green Porno.

The show, which spawned (no pun intended) from a series of short films of the same name that aired on the Sundance Channel (as well as, in part, at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival) features Rossellini, 61, in a professorial role, taking the stage wearing all-black with, it seems, only a lectern and a film screen at her disposal.

“Tonight, we’re going to talk about sex,” she begins, leaping into talk of mating and eroticism while ensuring the show will stop short of breaking down into a full-out audience orgy. From there, she transforms her passion for biology into a one-woman performance that employs everything from multi-media entertainment to cardboard cutouts to a full-body hamster costume.

Rossellini literally explains the birds and the bees, along with the snails and the gorillas and the jellyfish and the elephant seals and the salmon and the barnacles…well, you get the idea.

But the show is much more than just a creative and humorous way of explaining animal mating rituals. Rossellini cleverly explores the meaning of bigger, deeper questions of everything from attractiveness to evolution to femininity.

The humour is definitely one of the major draws of this show — frankly, I never thought I’d see Rossellini in costume, simulating snail foreplay or demonstrating that, with dolphins, anything goes sexually — but you can’t discount its intelligence.

Green Porno is 70 minutes of biology at its funniest and most fascinating. It’s also the sort of outside the box, imaginative yet accessible performance art that marks the best of Luminato.

Remarkably, however, there were a number of seats that went unfilled in the the upper level of the theatre last night – a loss not just for the box office but for prospective patrons who missed out. Maybe word about the show hasn’t spread. Maybe the name put some off. Either way, there are only two performances of Green Porno left. Don’t miss it.

Green Porno runs Saturday, June 7 (8pm) and Sunday June 8 (2pm) at the Winter Garden Theatre. Click here for show and ticket information.