Isabella Rossellini to speak on animal behavior, acting at ArtYard in Frenchtown

You can learn a lot from Isabella Rossellini’s new one-woman show. But “Darwin’s Smile” — the Emmy nominee’s meditation on empathy and its intersection with acting and the study of animal behavior — is certainly not a lecture.

“I don’t really want to be preaching anything,” said Rossellini. “So I’m not trying to say, ‘Don’t think you’re so special human beings, we are just like animals.’ I don’t have any philosophical (aims) or intention to teach anything to anybody.”

Instead, “Darwin’s Smile” is the latest result of Rossellini’s lifelong interest in animals, specifically animal behavior. She’ll bring it to the McDonnell Theater at ArtYard in Frenchtown for performances on Saturday, March 11, and Sunday, March 12.

Long before Rossellini, the daughter of actress Ingrid Bergman and filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, was a world-renowned model and co-star of films such as “Blue Velvet” (1986) and “Death Becomes Her” (1992), she was interested in animal behavior. But that field of study, ethology, hadn’t yet been established where she was growing up in Italy and France.

“So I just remained in the domain that I loved and was familiar to me — film, fashion,” she said. “I thought for a while to be costume designer. … But this interest in animals always remained.”

Rossellini did eventually study animal behavior, graduating with a master’s degree from New York City’s Hunter College in 2019. In recent years, she’s combined her life’s passions into the touring shows “Green Porno” and “Link Link Circus,” as well as the Webby Award-winning online version of “Green Porno” and its spin-offs “Seduce Me” and “Mammas.”

“I sort of combined what I knew — filmmaking, acting — with animal behavior,” she said.

Her goals, Rossellini explained, are simple.

"I just want to share the wonderment that animals make me feel or nature makes me feel,” she said.

‘I could do much more’

A decade ago, Rossellini founded Mama Farm in Brookhaven, N.Y., on Long Island. Home to a community-supported agriculture program, 150 members share its vegetables, eggs and honey.

The farm also includes a bed-and-breakfast, hosts events, and fosters collaborations with growers, researchers and students. (For more, check out Rossellini’s 2018 book “My Chickens and I.”)

Rossellini, now 70, is still active on screen, having recently appeared in the Oscar-nominated independent darling “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On,” as well as recent episodes of “Los Espookys” and “Julia.”

But she explained that Mama Farm, with a population that includes 200 chickens, is “completely directly connected” to her flurry of performances centered around animal behavior.

“When I went back to university and fulfilled this university (dream) that I had all my life, I sold my apartment,” she said. “And as you know, apartments in New York are very expensive, so with that money I could buy 30 acres and start a farm. It was a two-bedroom apartment! So, it just seemed to me that I could do much more with that money, and I started the farm.”

With “Darwin’s Smile,” Rossellini is taking her cues from Charles Darwin’s 1872 work “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals.”

“He asked a very simple question but if you think about it, it’s very profound: Why, if I smile, is it understand all over the world and yet if I do certain other gestures — and I’m Italian, I have a lot of gestures — it’s understood only in Italy?” Rossellini said. “So certain expressions of emotion are learned by the culture where you are, and certain others are not, like smiling or showing anger.”

Empathy, she added, is difficult to measure.

“Science needs thermometers, a scale, a ruler, something. And that’s the dilemma that I found as an actress who dipped my feet into science. … So (‘Darwin’s Smile’) is also a meditation on that. As an actress, what can I bring to the science of communication among animals? And empathy is one of the things we’ve neglected.”

Go: Isabella Rossellini in “Darwin’s Smile,” 7 p.m. Saturday, March 11, and 3 p.m. Sunday, March 12, McDonnell Theater, ArtYard, 13 Front St., Frenchtown, $80; artyard.org/events/isabella-rossellinis-darwins-smile.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Isabella Rossellini brings 'Darwin's Smile' to McDonnell Theater in NJ