Lenny Bruce at the Biennale
Lenny Bruce is back in town for one night only - 42 years after his death. Bruce is the subject of a single performance play at the Biennale on Thursday 19 June, Just Because Everything Is Different, It Does Not Mean That Anything Has Changed.
When Bruce last toured Australia in September 1962 (see Time Out #22), his shows were a magnet for wowsers and the Vice Squad, who bundled him off stage barely a sentence into his controversial off-the-cuff bit at a show at Sydney University. The audience, who were already divided and shocked by what they'd seen, never got to see the shows they paid for.
Author and Oz raconteur, Richard Neville, who like Lenny would later spend time at obscenity trials, had organised a second show at Sydney Uni and then saw his final show at the Wintergarden Theatre in Rose Bay.
Bruce - born Leonard Schneider - carved his career into the bedrock of the Be-bop Nation, and created eye-watering provocations with a comic veneer beneath which he questioned everything: authority, religion, sexuality and human nature... all were fair game. He was no stranger to persecution and police harassment, so he left our shores quietly. He died at home in his bathroom in 1966, victim of an opiate habit that ran parallel to his career, both of which began in the burlesque bars in the 1940s.
Spanish performance artist Dora Garcia's own interest in Lenny Bruce began as part of greater research into the role of American stand up comedians during the Kennedy years. Lenny's name emerged as the one with the most lasting influence.
"I began to see that he was incredibly far ahead of his time," says Garcia, who has devised the show in which an actor, Harli Ammouchi (pictured with ciggie), will deliver a 45-minute routine based on audio recordings of Bruce's most famous shows. "I wrote up transcripts based on the material he worked with in the early 1960s before he came to Australia. I became very interested in the relationship he had with his audience.
"Australia is very much the place where his work met with the most resistance. What he was working towards was not special - it is simple in a way. He wanted love from people."
In tribute to the show that Lenny was unable to perform in Australia, Garcia will direct Ammouchi in the role of Bruce, performing some of Lenny's own monologues dealing with censorship and discrimination from the same year. "Even though Lenny was very improvisational, he was a genius at engaging the audience," says Ammouchi.
"Comedy is truth, and his voice rebellious enough to tell the truth. His objective was never just about jokes. He spoke to what is, not what should be."
"He used to speak about being Jewish in the sense the Jews were frowned on by certain parts of America, that there was some shame in being from the people who ‘killed the Lord'. He said, ‘There's a good chance it will be put upon the Arabs in years to come'."
"It's a most interesting part for me as an actor. This show is for one night only. I respect the material so much, and I want to portray the essence of the man. It's renewed my respect for stand up."
‘Just Because Everything Is Different, It Does Not Mean That Anything Has Changed', The Studio, Sydney Opera House. Thursday June 19 at 6.30pm, all tickets $20, bookings essential (02 9250 7777).