Sex and Consequences by Isabella Rossellini (review)

In Isabella Rossellini’s short film “Praying Mantis,” the actress dons a green bodysuit with extra legs and wings attached. She describes her life as a male praying mantis: “I can turn my head almost 360 degrees without moving any other parts of my body. I can change color to camouflage myself and hide in nature.” She describes her mate, a humansized mantis puppet, as a cannibal. But Rossellini-as-mantis will mate with her anyway. She hops over to the puppet, narrating her actions, and demonstrates mantis mating. Suddenly, the musical underscore turns eerie, playing high-pitched strings as Rossellini cries, “She would snatch my head off.” The mantis puppet devours Rossellini’s head as she yells, “She would eat me, but I keep copulating. Nothing stops me. I keep going.” The film abruptly ends as Rossellini hollers, “SEX!”

Isabella Rossellini sports her “Fly” costume, complete with wings and an extra set of limbs. (Photo: Jody Shapiro.)

This short film, from Rossellini’s 2008 collection Green Porno, usefully encapsulates the mission of the actress’s oeuvre of solo performance, including her most recent piece, Sex and Consequences, a streaming performance that combined clips from her previous film work with intimate live segments of the actress in her home, the working Mama Farm in Long Island, New York. Rossellini created the show with director Paul Magid (best known as one of the founders of the Flying Karamazov Brothers) and streamed it over several weeks in the fall of 2020. Although the COVID-19 pandemic was the primary reason for the show’s virtual nature, the streaming schedule allowed audiences in multiple locations and time zones access to this informative and hilarious performance, which featured not only the illustrious actress Rossellini, but also a variety of puppets and even live animals. The combination of Rossellini’s playful mannerisms with the madcap aesthetic of recorded performances, featuring her dressed up as a wide variety of nonhumans, created an amusing and informative peek into the strange world of animals’ sexual habits. Rossellini’s cheeky demeanor took on an almost conspiratorial tone as she granted viewers access to her private life, like seeing a teacher outside of the classroom; this sense was only heightened by the forced isolation that characterizes the pandemic.

Rossellini, who holds a master’s degree in animal behavior and conservation from Hunter College, has long been focused on communicating scientific knowledge to audiences via film and live solo performances. She began this effort with a series of short films produced by Sundance TV. The result was Green Porno, which launched Rossellini into viral stardom. Each film sees Rossellini portray a particular animal via simply constructed costumes and vibrant, colorful makeup. She uses first-person narration to describe the animal’s behavior: “If I were a salmon, the last act of my life would be making love”; “If I were a bee, a queen bee, I would be very fat, and do nothing else but lay eggs.” Her scene partners are most often puppets or other objects standing in for members of the animal kingdom. The films’ campy aesthetics, coupled with Rossellini’s serious and scientific tone, are simultaneously informative, hilarious, and a bit weird. She went on to create two more film collections, Seduce Me (2010) and Mammas (2013), and a stage monologue, Green Porno Live (2014).

Each work takes an unabashed look at the wild ways of animal mating and have been rich material for ecofeminists and queer theorists. Rossellini brought this same zany affect from her shorts (like “Praying Mantis”) to the live segments of Sex and Consequences, most specifically through a stuffed human-body puppet. The lumpy white puppet, whose human features are limited to two arms, two legs, and a faceless head, she named her husband, Roberto. Throughout the performance, Rossellini manipulated Roberto’s stuffed, pale limbs in a cheeky rehearsal of human courtship, underlining the connections that her work makes between human and animal behavior. At one point...