Sydney playwright Benito Di Fonzo certainly knows how to choose complex, intense subjects for his plays. His best known play to date is his fringe hit, THE CHRONIC ILLS OF ROBERT ZIMMERMAN, exploring the mystique surrounding Bob Dylan. His new play, LENNY BRUCE: 13 DAZE UN-DUG IN SYDNEY 1962, sees him turn his focus to the late, legendary Jewish American comedian, Lenny Bruce (born Leonard Alfred Schneider, 1925-1966), and his turbulent tour to Sydney, Australia in the early sixties.

Bruce found Sydney excruciatingly dull, conservative, and way behind the New York Yankee beat. When he was asked how he felt playing the Aaron’s nightclub in King Cross he responded, ‘Making me play here was like booking Hermann Goering to appear at a Jewish charity dance’.

With his belligerent nature, Bruce responded by making his act even more profane and outrageous than it already was, alienating and provoking the Establishment and the police. He was about to be booked in to spend some time in a little room at Long Bay when he managed to procure a quick plane ticket out of the country. The Vice-Squad regarded Lenny as an undesirable alien and Lenny later lamented that his Australian tour had used the law to kill him and that he would surely die of ‘an over-dose of police.’ .

Over the thirteen days we get to know Bruce well. The show features plenty of nightclub shtick along with Bruce’s encounters with journalists, Kings Cross identities including king-pin Abe Saffron and the like…Bruce is outspoken, bewildering and never dull…

‘I don’t want some chick that can quote Kerouac and walk with poise. I just want to hear my old lady say, Get up and fix the sink, it’s still making noise’.

Bruce didn’t see himself as a comedian, ‘I am not a comedian…I am a Doctor…I am a surgeon with a scalpel for false values…I trade in the truth…Words become soiled in people’s minds…Drag them out…turn them around, and they lose their power to hurt’.

Bruce said his ‘economic success depends on the existence of sex, segregation, violence, disease, without which I would be on the bread line’.

He saw his shtick as, ‘a kind of brain jazz…the microphone is my horn’. It is not hard to see how Bruce was an inspiration for the next generation of American comedians such as Robin Williams.

Director Lucina Gleeson and her cast bring Di Fonzo’s script passionately to life. Sam Haft gives his all to playing the maverick comedian. He is well supported by Lenore Munro, Damien Strouthos and Dorje Swallow who each play many bit parts, including well known celebrities of the time such as entertainers Col Joye and Lana Cantrell and social radical Richard Neville.

A Tamarama Rock Surfers Theatre Comnpany production in association with the Sydney Comedy Festival, Benito Di Fonzo’s play LENNY BRUCE: 13 DAZE UN-DUG IN SYDNEY 1962, loosely adapted from Damien Kringa’s book LENNY BRUCE: 13 DAYS IN SYDNEY, opened at the Bondi Pavilion Theatre, Queen Elizabeth Drive, Bondi Beach on Wednesday 17th April and runs until Saturday 4th May, 2013.

© David Kary

22nd April, 2013

Tags: Sydney Stage Reviews- LENNY BRUCE: 13 DAZE UN-DUG IN SYDNEY 1962, Benito Di Fonzo, Tamarama Rock Surfers Theatre Company, Lucinda Gleeson, Sam Haft, Lenore Munro, Damien Strouthos, Dorje Swallow, Marnya Rothe, Sydney Arts Guide, David Kary