When director Joe Mantegna and actor Ronnie Marmo introduced their one-man show “I’m Not a Comedian ... I’m Lenny Bruce” to lower Manhattan in 2019, they thought it important, just like the performer whose life inspired the play, to use the racially charged “N-Word,” even though it sometimes led to audience members prematurely leaving the theater.
The idea was to strip that vile term of its power for both Bruce in the 1960s and Marmo, a half-century later.
Now, after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police during a May 2020 arrest that led to a summer of nationwide protests and amid the national cultural shift that’s occurred in recent years, Mantegna and Marmo are bringing their show back to the East Coast — but they’re leaving the racial slur behind.
