The People vs. Lenny Bruce is a new (just-)off-Broadway play that depicts Lenny Bruce’s 1964 NYC obscenity trial from the POV of his lawyer Martin Garbus (still fighting the good fight to this very day; check out environmental lawyer Stephen Donziger’s recent battle against house arrest imposed by a bought-and-paid-for judge). It’s an unusual creation, since playwright Susan Charlotte presents a mixture of three things: dialogue from the court transcripts, what Garbus would’ve liked to have seen happen (fantasy moments where Lenny himself is the defense attorney, before he actually did become his own lawyer), and the bits that got Lenny arrested (and a few others that show what his non-controversial routines were like). It’s an ambitious task and succeeds at certain moments and at others… not so much.
On the plus side of the ledger, we get to see how the prosecution stacked the deck against Lenny, trying to discredit him and the witnesses who spoke for the importance of his act. In this regard both Stephen Schnetzer as Garbus and Johnny Anthony as Lenny (who doesn’t look like Lenny at all but is able to capture his mannerisms and attitude quite well) distinguish themselves. The other cast members are harder to judge, as either their roles are underwritten (as with the prosecutor and an undercover officer tasked with recreating Lenny’s bits for the judge) or they don’t act or sound anything like the people they’re playing and thus are just playing “types.”
In the latter category are the actors playing Dorothy Kilgallen and Jules Feiffer (Roberta Wallach and Timothy Doyle), who were witnesses for the defense at Lenny’s NYC trial. There is a primness and propriety about both figures as depicted in this play that runs counter to how they really behaved, and how they looked and sounded. Both seem like school librarians rather than a nationally famous columnist (who was indeed familiar with bars and nightclubs from her work covering show business events) and a very hip (yet wonderfully neurotic) cartoonist/satirist.
The piece is quite compact (one set, 90 minutes, a small ensemble) and offers a microcosm of the legal troubles that beset Lenny in a rather simplistic fashion; it thus can serve as an interesting “101” for those who are not familiar with Lenny and his legal troubles. Lenny cultists (like me) will be jarred, however, by the very pat construction of several scenes.
What one is left with, ultimately, is Garbus’s final haunting image of Lenny, whom he never saw again after the trial was over. And an inevitable postscript is added at the end: Lenny was finally pardoned for the obscenity conviction in 2003 by N.Y. governor Pataki, a mere 37 years after Lenny’s tragic death in 1966. (It was the first posthumous pardon in N.Y. state history.)
Of course, there was a critically lauded play written about Lenny by Julian Barry that ran on Broadway from 1971-72. That play used one of Lenny’s trials as a jumping-off point for his routines and various flashbacks to his earlier life; Barry turned it into a more linear package in the script for Bob Fosse’s Lenny (1974), starring Dustin Hoffman. That play and film appeared a mere five and eight years after Lenny’s death, so he was still a familiar figure in pop culture — these days he is thought of in a purely iconic, remote way (most prominently as a plot contrivance on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), except by those who still listen to his brilliant routines. (See below.)
Therefore, The People Vs. Lenny Bruce has to basically reintroduce Lenny to older audience members and “explain” him to the younger ones. In the course of doing that, Anthony does capture Lenny’s hipster cadences and tries to do justice to the “beats” in his material — although, on the night when I saw the show, his delivery of the final routine that is included in the play (the suddenly-a-bachelor bit “All Alone,” which Lenny performed on The Steve Allen Show) lacked a few of the comic beats that Lenny threw in the material. (Lenny’s toss-off delivery of “She was the lowest” in the bit, meant to be a comic line, was delivered flat and taken by the audience as just an insult, rather than the 180-degree swerve in tone that Lenny was so fond of.)
Setting aside the reinterpretations here of known commodities in the play (Lenny, Kilgallen, Feiffer), it will always be important to remember Lenny, who did indeed set all subsequent standups “free” from prosecution for using “dirty” language in their act (and, more importantly, for the sharp satirical jabs at American morality contained alongside that language). The fact that he included such language in his act not only freed up standup comics to express themselves however they wished but also many rock and rap performers, who can do what they do because Lenny took an incredible amount of legal abuse back in the Sixties.
The People vs. Lenny Bruce will run until the end of June at Theatre Row at 410 W 42nd Street.
Two things in closing: first, an acknowledgement of the recent death of Kitty Bruce, Lenny’s daughter, who died on May 13 at the age of 70. Kitty worked hard to preserve Lenny’s legacy, as she inherited all of the tapes he made of his performances. Unfortunately, she held on to these tapes for a very long time and denied use of them to documentarians. (I remember Robert Weide saying he couldn’t get access to them for his 1998 doc Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth.) By the time she let the late, much-missed producer Hal Willner craft them into an amazing box set (Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware), there was sadly much less interest in Lenny’s work, and so the box didn’t sell very well.
And lastly, to answer the moronic assertion by some modern day comics and critics (looking at you, Patton Oswalt; not an expert on anything) that Lenny was “important but not funny,” I will always recommend the two full albums that provide us with the best range of his material, Live at the Curran Theater (3 LPs; aka The Legendary Lenny Bruce) and Carnegie Hall (also 3 LPs; aka The Carnegie Hall Concert), with The Berkeley Concert (2 LPs) being nearly as good.
On Carnegie Hall is the routine that turned me on to Lenny and which remains one of the great touchstones of his work that pissed off pious Jews and Catholics alike, called “Christ and Moses.” (cued up)