One of the special aspects of theater is that every once in a while—or more often, if you’re very lucky—you walk into an auditorium and something wonderful you’ve never seen before unfolds in front of you. This is what Sergei Diaghilev meant when he insisted “Étonne-moi,” or “Astonish me.”
Right now, but only for a 14-performance run, Isabella Rossellini is presenting Link Link Circus, a modestly astonishing 80-minute discussion—with all sorts of multi-media decorations—about animal behavior. The question she’s asking (and has asked since her childhood, she says) is whether animals think and feel.
It’s a question that has prodded her for so long she’s added to her acting and modeling career a stint at Hunter College where she’s now completing a master’s degree in animal behavior and conservation. (N. B.: As a model she’s again one of the faces of Lancôme.)
To some extent, Link Link Circus could be called a fancy-pants master’s thesis. Through it Rossellini examines the “links” between animals and humans. She’s interested in how animals learn—demonstrating that they do learn but pointing out that learning doesn’t necessarily equate with thinking.
No, her piece can’t exactly be called a play—although there’s much playfulness in it. More accurately, it’s a lecture, but what a lecture! And note that few lectures take place on what looks like the circus set that Andy Byers and Rick Gilbert provide. It includes toys Rossellini had when she was a child and includes several pedestals on which masks and the like rest that at times Rossellini looks through.
Lecture, indeed, but the rare lecture you’ll ever attend that also includes a dog. The mixed-breed co-star here is Darcy, whom Rossellini found at a shelter in 2018 and who has now been trained by famous trainer Bill Berloni (cf. Annie for one credit). Explaining that she more often refers to Darcy as Peter Pan—or Pan, for short—Rossellini continually shares the stage with Pan, who often trots on or off right on cue or is carried out in various costumes by Byers, who designed the costume Rossellini wears. It’s a version of a circus ringmaster’s get-up. You know, red tails and vest but here with white trousers attached over the long black dress she wears. (She claims she’s presiding over the smallest circus in the world.)
Before Rossellini gets to expounding on intelligence, consciousness and mind in animals—those are the possibilities she’s mooting—she does devote a couple minutes to discussing sex in animals. In particular, she brings up a recently discovered beetle with an unusually long penis. This is a beetle, she reports, named after her. Apparently, she was in touch with the biologists who discovered it, and they dispensed the honor.
Along her cheerful way, she looks, for instance, at how animals communicate, retaining what they’ve learned. One of the most charming and enlightening sequences—in a work loaded with charm and enlightenment—occurs when she puts on chimpanzee gloves to recount the story of a chimpanzee whose hair was combed and teeth brushed. When the chimp gave birth, she treated the infant chimpanzee the same way.
At other times in the program that Rossellini wrote herself and has directed with Guido Torlonia, she talks about birdsong and demonstrates that birds, depending on where they spend their time, actually have accents. She spends several minutes discussing selection and how through selection wolves became domesticated and, presto-chango over the millennia, there are dogs. She goes on about how the senses differ between humans and animals, pointing out how more sophisticated(?) sight and smell are in the latter.
Videos abound in Link Link Circus, many of them featuring Rossellini as, say, a fish. No matter what she’s gotten up as, she’s always smiling. It’s quite a smile, of course. She inherited it from her mom, Ingrid Bergman, whom she greatly resembles and whose name she does slyly slip in—but only once.
As Rossellini, Pan and Byers are finishing up, she admits she still has no definitive answers on whether or how animals think and feel. Nonetheless, she has convincingly demonstrated that they learn. Moreover and thanks to her seemingly impromptu, carefully worked-out production, the audience has learned plenty and in an undeniably astonishing way.
Link Link Circus opened April 22, 2019, at the Frederick Loewe Theatre and runs through May 3. Tickets and information: huntertheaterproject.org
