Lenny Bruce, naked, died of an overdose in a Los Angeles bathroom on August 3, 1966. He’d fallen near the toilet. As a stand-up comic with a long reputation of having a potty-mouth, even he might have had a laugh at the water-closet irony.
He might even have approved of the opening I’m Not a Comedian…I’m Lenny Bruce image, which reveals Ronnie Marmo—who wrote the one-man show and plays Bruce—seated on a toilet in full-length profile. (N.B.: Bruce wasn’t found in that position: He was sprawled on the floor.)
When Marmo figures audience members have registered the in-flagrante sight, he rises as Bruce and says he’s going to fill in his life as it led to his ignominious death. Wearing boxer shorts as he begins, he dresses in white shirt, 1950s-thin black tie, shoes and blue suit. (Bruce jokes that it’s “a bar mitzvah suit.”)
Skipping quickly over his childhood, Bruce reports his first time behind a mic. He was a spur-of-the-moment fill-in for a small-club comedian. Nervous, he nevertheless thinks up a withering adlib for a heckler and thereby gets his first laugh.
That does it for him. A medium-sized Jewish fellow (born Leonard Alfred Schneider in Mineola, New York), he’s off and running to become the seminal stand-up comic of his generation and of, so far, a couple generations to follow. His exalted groundbreaking place in comedy history is due to a use of language never before accepted on comedy stages.
Regarded by many—including police precincts and courts across the country—as obscene, he maintained that he was not obscene but was attacking hypocrisy; sending up hypocrisy being a staple of comic expression over decades, centuries. His comic obsession was hypocrisy in language—the n-word, a couple of c-words and much more of the blushing like.
Bearing a close enough resemblance to Bruce, Marmo reprises excerpts from routines to prove the late comic’s—and Marmo’s—comic theses. He’s excellent at assuming Bruce’s casual approach, his easy gestures, his soft, seductive voice. Marmo’s delivery matches Bruce’s so that the material lands now as it did then. Okay, not quite. The material lands, but since it’s over 50 years since Bruce’s demise, it doesn’t exactly resonate with the mid-20th-century shock it initially propelled.
Whenever Bruce grabs the mic, he’s meant to be in a club reprising scathing but trenchant comedy hunks. Whenever he puts the mic aside, he’s being autobiographical. A restless womanizer, Bruce discusses the only three women he ever truly loved: his mother Sally Marr, whose sense of humor he admits to having appropriated; his stripper wife Honey Harlow with whom he fought and reconciled over and again; and his daughter, Kitty. He further admits that in time, due to drugs and alcohol, he strained relationships with Honey and Kitty pretty much to the breaking point.
Since Bruce was arrested frequently, the obscenity charges were the ones he fought most aggressively—while allowing himself to deteriorate publicly. Marmo doesn’t flinch from recreating these disparaging events. In them an often out-of-control, disheveled Bruce challenges judges and the judicial system with no eventual satisfaction.
Joe Mantegna is the director here. Somehow it seems fitting that the man who won awards playing Ricky Roma in Glengarry Glen Ross and got to say “Always tell the truth, it’s the easiest thing to remember” is applying what he knows to a portrayal of self-appointed truth-telling Lenny Bruce.
Strong as the I’m Not a Comedian…I’m Lenny Bruce writing and performing are, there is one particularly pertinent biographical acknowledgment missing: what Bruce picked up from friend and fellow comedian Joe Ancis. Just as multitudes today insist current stand-up comics wouldn’t be where they are without Bruce forging the trail for them, Bruce contemporaries frequently declared that Bruce wouldn’t have achieved his status without Ancis as a major influence. It might have been nice for Marmo to get around to him, if only briefly.
Full disclosure: I did see Bruce at the Village Gate not too long before he overdid it with morphine. By that time, he was reprising for audiences the court raillery for which he had become known. He’d ceased to be funny, but he hadn’t ceased to be fascinating. Whether it was right for us in the audience to watch a man unraveling as a form of entertainment, there we were, able to boast that at least we’d seen him.
I’m Not a Comedian…I’m Lenny Bruce opened November 4, 2018, at The Cutting Room and runs through January 25, 2019. Tickets and information: lennybruceonstage.com
