The Broken Taboo Breaker

By Douglas Auchincloss

Gradually the stage fills with weird, masked figures from the mists of prehistory: tribesmen in vast, shaggy costumes thumping drums, bonging gongs, pinging cymbals. Enormous idols appear. Frenzied, the primitives swirl and bang and jabber. The shaman speaks: God demands a sacrifice, the greatest sacrifice is sex, a taboo is born.

Bad anthropology, perhaps, but excellent theater as a prologue to the stage apotheosis of the late Lenny Bruce as Taboo Breaker. In Lenny, which opened on Broadway last week, the stand-up comic with the dirty mouth who died five years ago of a heroin overdose at the age of 40 has become a folk hero of the counterculture. The smartass kid from New York with his run-of-the-strip-joint shtiks ends by challenging the hypocrisies and fears and inequities of the whole square world out there.

That the production works--as it does, for the most part, brilliantly--is the result of the triangulated talent: the real Lenny Bruce's savage eloquence, the dynamism of Actor Cliff Gorman in the title role, the high theatrical imagination of Director Tom O'Horgan. The script by Julian Barry draws largely from Bruce's original material.

Anti-Church Melange. O'Horgan, who honed his free-flowing, choreographic style of staging at off-off-Broadway's Cafe La Mama and in the productions of Tom Paine, Futz and most famously Hair, emerges in Lenny as one of the top directors of the U.S. theater. He manages to meld Bruce's sleazy world of one-night stands, his marital hopes and horrors, his helpless, raging entanglement in the courts, and even his vaulting fantasies into a fluid continuum up, down and around the multilevel stage. Lenny was a microphone man; mikes perpetually cut in and out, held and handled as integral parts of the action. Giant effigies from Lenny's pain-filled mind loom and dangle suddenly into the set: Dracula, Jackie Kennedy, Little Orphan Annie, Richard Nixon. Even Hitler (in five-foot boots) and Eichmann (in his glass booth) stalk in for a turn. Some of the visual hyperbole misfires--notably an inchoate anti-church melange with Moses and Christ turning up unfortunately as a couple of naked men in plastic bottles.

But most of it is successful. And all of it is charged by the virtuoso performance of Cliff Gorman, hitherto best known for his role as the swishiest homosexual in both the stage and film versions of The Boys in the Band. Gorman dominates every scene--belting out the bitter monologues, batting back the foul-mouthed wisecracks, delivering dialects, imitations, sound effects--including a tour de force impersonation of a tape recorder on fast rewind. The first-night audience gave him a well-deserved standing ovation. They may also have been applauding for Bruce, whose time has come--belatedly.

qed Douglas Auchincloss

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