Correct, not politically Lenny may be rough, but it's funny as hell BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	Lenny By Julian Barry | Directed by Rodney Nason | Produced by Rodney Nason at Geno’s, in Portland | Aug 17-24 | 207.899.5718

I can’t think of a better Portland spot than Geno’s to resurrect Lenny Bruce. You’ve got your depraved dive-bar spirit, your hip night-club space, your artsy-lefty programming and decor, your distant ghosts of tits and asses. Apparently Geno himself even saw Lenny back in the ’60s, before morphine laid the stand-up comic out on a bathroom floor. Yep, Geno’s is surely the right place for Lenny, a rambunctious theatrical portrait of modern comedy’s enfant terrible.

As flyers for Lenny appeared, its provenance remained the stuff of intrigue around the local theater circuit. To dispel the mystery: Formed specifically for this production by local punk-rocker and sometime poet Rodney Nason, R.A.N. Acts is an incarnation of Fly By Night Players, which put up sporadic shows around town in the late ’90s. In 2000, Fly By Night and Nason staged Lenny’s Portland debut at the Skinny, and now Nason is back directing and producing a new production, in a revamped venue, and with a Lenny who’s been waiting for years to step up to the mike.

Like Bob Fosse’s bio-pic Lenny, on which its script is based, this show presents the timeline of the outraged funny-man’s career, drug-addled marriage, and struggles against a barrage of obscenity charges. Along the way, the show is peppered with his acts — his outrageous rants on hypocrisy, sexual mores, racism, language, and the insidious inanity that would one day be called "political correctness."

Julian Barry’s 1971 script makes a provocative bio even more madcap by often dramatizing Lenny’s routines into fully-cast ensemble sketches. For example, instead of watching Lenny, alone at the mic, doing a handful of voices in his "Mass Man" routine (about a sexually curious Lone Ranger), we see ensemble members actually acting out the masked man’s acquisition of a young Injun. There’s some robbery in this approach, as one of Lenny’s signatures is his swift and percussive dialogue change-ups, but it also makes for a much more visual show, and a more cacophonous one. The effect, stylized thus, is of actually being inside Lenny’s brain, where unspeakable words and exciting body parts bounce around at high velocity.

Rick Soloman, a longtime Stone Pinhead, has long hankered to inhabit the title role, and with his swarthy features and brooding eyes, he certainly looks the part. He’s great at conveying the fraught grab-bag of rage and playfulness that made up Lenny Bruce. Like much of the cast, he seems less certain of his timing in the bio exposition scenes — when he first meets his stripper wife Rusty (Diana Duane); when she calls him collect from Hawaii to ask for money — but behind the mic he’s a firecracker. He has a great sense of the rhythm with which Lenny spouted his mongrel poetry of Yiddish, profanities, and jazz jive, and although audio problems in the mic’ing sometimes muffled his delivery, Soloman’s minutes alone are among the best moments of the show. Particularly fun is the famous " ‘To’ is a preposition; ‘come’ is a verb" routine, chanted Beat-style with jazz drums accompanying.

The ensemble that animates the strange fruit of Lenny’s brain (and which includes busy Director/Producer Nason) must have a lot of momentum, with some actors playing as many as nine different parts. Although the pacing during straight exposition scenes is often flaccid (and much of the fault lies in the script itself), the ensemble’s energy is at its most audacious and their timing at its most taut during Lenny’s routines. The epitome of what this cast does well is the "Blah Blah Blah" sketch, in which Lenny skewers his censors by continuously repeating a tri-syllabic bleep, which everyone nonetheless understands to denote "cocksucking." Nason’s staging of the routine has "blah blah blah" coming from all directions, on and off the stage (typical of his fine and varied use of Geno’s space), in uproarious rapid-fire fashion.

These actors represent a healthy slice of the Portland scene. Joshua Douglas (a beatnik, lawyer, and plainclothesman) recently brought us excellent zombies in Bury the Dead; the dynamic Jay Piscopo (who does a leper, Lenny’s Judge, and a voodoo marriage priest, among other roles) is a cartoonist who’s acted with Mad Horse and the Stone Pinhead Ensemble. Cool jazzy music, an expressive asset to the show, is performed by street musician/noise artist Michael Hayden. Michael Deloose struts some mean drag onstage, and Crystal Vaccaro, as a Life reporter, prison matron, wife from the chicken skit (about men and sex), and six other roles, has a notably fine range and comic intensity.

Like its subject, its venue, and, I daresay, its audience, Lenny is a little rough around the edges at times. But its energy is fierce, its scope ambitious, and its humor high. Portland needs more of this. May Nason’s Lenny set a precedent for getting riskier theater out there and into all the right places.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com