Laughing on The Inside Too

By RICHARD CORLISS

Father Dan is homosexual, like nearly every other character in Jeffrey, Paul Rudnick's rollicking AIDS play. Not sex-mad, exactly -- sex-nutty. "Do you know what it's like in that confessional?" he rhetorically asks Jeffrey, a Manhattan actor-waiter whom the priest has vamped in St. Patrick's Cathedral. " 'Father, I've had impure thoughts about my soccer coach.' Where are the Polaroids? What am I, a mind reader? Say six Hail Marys and bring me his shorts!"

Our hero is no less shocked and outraged by this catechism of concupiscence than a middle-class Manhattan playgoer might be. But because the plague years have forced Jeffrey to retreat from sex, or even from expressions of love, he is desperate for wisdom from any source. And -- surprise! -- Father Dan has some for him. "Of course life sucks," the cleric says. "It always will. So how dare you not make the most of it? . . . There's only one real blasphemy: the refusal of joy! Of a corsage and a kiss!"

The speech is vintage Rudnick -- a party wine with a bouquet of sentiment and the kick of rude truth. To the tart social wit of gay writers from Oscar Wilde to Joe Orton he adds irrepressible high spirits -- a tonic when so much of literature has the terminal glums. This Renaissance jester is a yea-sayer, a missionary for joy. "Usually when I'm asked why I write," says Rudnick, 35, "I reply, 'To avoid a day job.' But the truth is that there are people in real life I want to honor. It's easy to write about despair. It's tough to present optimism realistically and appealingly. I think it's a worthwhile goal to help people find genuine pleasure without feeling like fools. So I do try to celebrate. It doesn't get real Samuel Beckett in Paul Rudnickland."

Just now, Rudnickland is a rewarding place to be. Jeffrey, a delightful comedy on a tragic theme, is an off-Broadway hit, with regional productions and a possible movie sale in the offing. Playgoers may be shocked by the NC-17 dialogue, but that is just a test. "People in the audience often look fearful," Rudnick says, "that the actors will be coming down the aisles to . . . date them, or something. They think, 'I can't take this,' and then about 20 seconds later they're laughing."

He has made his mark, if not his name, in movies too. Sister Act, the Whoopi Goldberg comedy for which Rudnick wrote the original script, was last summer's boffo surprise. Other hands diluted the screenplay, which Rudnick eventually signed with the pseudonym Joseph Howard; but the movie grossed $140 million, so now, "although there is no Joseph Howard, his career is soaring." Rudnick's uncredited rewrite of The Addams Family ($115 million) is "the reason that movie was a hit," says Scott Rudin, who produced it and Sister Act and who hired Rudnick to write the sequel, Addams Family Values, due out in November. Today, with class and mass smashes, Rudnick is hotter than sex in the '70s.

So far, he has the glory without the fame. The distinction is explained by a character in Rudnick's 1991 Broadway comedy I Hate Hamlet: "Fame pays better. Fame has beachfront property. Fame needs bodyguards." But Rudnick's pay is fine, thanks. He doesn't need Malibu acreage; he has a dashingly ornate apartment -- one previously tenanted by John Barrymore, just like the I Hate Hamlet flat -- in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. Rudnick would laugh off bodyguards; he is an unguarded fellow in an edgy age. "Paul is so charming," says his old friend William Ivey Long, a Tony-winning costume designer, "that you suspect something is lurking underneath. But amazingly, he really is a nice guy."

We couldn't show you the fall line of skeletons in Rudnick's closet, because he came out of it long ago. He seems wildly well adjusted, at ease with his career, his sexuality, his place on earth. He is a happy camper and a nonstop talker; he's like a character in his novel Social Disease, who "had pledged a lifelong vow of chatter, as surely as Trappists chose silence." He writes what he wants, and people like it. He eats what he wants -- a deplorable diet of M&M's and bagels -- yet has a slim figure and good teeth. "I have the eating habits of a four-year-old," Rudnick says. "I'm fond of anything you'd have after school." No wonder the message of Rudnick's most personal work (Jeffrey, Social Disease and his other novel, I'll Take It) is that the strangest people have the sweetest hearts. You lift a rock expecting to find insects, and instead: beachfront.

In the delirious whirl of the Manhattan club scene depicted in Social Disease (1986), le plus chic twosome is Guy and Venice Huber, dancing their youth away -- and, because they are Rudnick people, constantly refreshing it. With its Evelyn Waugh drawl, Social Disease is Rudnick's revenge on the less- than-zilch nightlife novels of the mid-'80s. So I'll Take It (1989) must be his anti-Portnoy. A Jewish boy who loves and enjoys his mother -- call the cops! Paul's mom Selma and her sisters Lillian and Hilda are the models for Hedy Reckler and her bargain-hunter siblings. The novel is "only" about a New England shopping tour, on which Hedy's son Joe hitches a ride. But if war novels can teach us about manhood, why can't a shopping novel reconcile capitalism and humanism? And do so in a voice that merges Jane Austen with a Bloomingdale's catalog? I'll Take It is about informed, unconditional family love; this makes it rare among modern novels.

Plots eventually intrude in both books -- a jail term in Social Disease, a heist at L.L. Bean in I'll Take It -- but these are as unwelcome as the roast beef a heedless hostess might plop on Paul's dinner plate. The M&M's of bon mots are the real nourishment. Which suggests a criticism of Rudnick's prose: it's all candy. Wouldn't a truly serious author hang crape on Guy and Venice, or Hedy and her sisters? But Rudnick sees them as variations on the Addams family: they may be crazy, but they have fun and love each other. And so he loves them.

He feels the same about the Rudnick clan of Piscataway, N.J. Paul's father Norman was a physicist at Gulton Industries, which, Paul says, "developed a lot of things that to this day I do not understand: capacitors, transistor devices that would go into everything from Osterizers to rocket ships." Later he edited one of the first textbooks on AIDS. Selma has worked for Partisan Review, for the Pennsylvania Ballet and now for a Philadelphia concert producer. Paul's older brother Evan, a jack-of-all-trades, lives near Ithaca, N.Y. "He has long hair and a beard and is very good at all the things that I'm not."

Selma, a big Paul Rudnick fan who has seen Jeffrey three times -- "Is that more than David Mamet's mother saw Oleanna, do you suppose?" -- recalls that her son was a clever child. "But he was not the Paul we see today," she says, "because parents don't really see that. A parent is always trying to get a child to do what he doesn't want to do. And Paul's response to this was, 'No, I won't clean up my room.' At the time, I didn't find that particularly witty."

Paul's homosexuality was no big deal to his parents. "Although they've always been incredibly supportive," he says, "and could not have been more loving and 'there' for me, it was the kind of thing that wasn't discussed. It was quietly acknowledged. I still don't discuss my sex life with my parents, and I don't think I would if I were straight either."

He was a good student, who on his SAT tests got "great verbal, nonexistent math. I was so bad at math I assumed any college would say, 'Well, we just won't ask him to add.' " The college turned out to be Yale. By now Paul knew he was gay, but he didn't worry about the local reaction. "Anyone from Jersey," he says, "would assume everyone at Yale was gay. Once you're educated above a certain point, to the rest of the world you're a big sissy."

At Yale, Long was already ornamenting the graduate drama school. "I was trailing clouds of lavender smoke," he avers, "and Paul wanted to catch some of it. We were all sort of larger than life -- in our own minds." If Rudnick had that self-image, he soon grew into it. A few years after graduation, he had his own off-Broadway play: Poor Little Lambs, an engaging pastiche about Yale's Whiffenpoof singers. Rudnick worked on a movie version (never filmed) and was eventually introduced to Rudin, his Hollywood mentor. "Over the years," Rudin says, "Paul has changed, in a really gratifying way. At the beginning, there was this sense that he was not fully committed to being a writer. It wasn't so much irresponsible as sort of slightly flaky."

As flaky, perhaps, as Libby Gelman-Waxner, the yenta film critic whose column appears in Premiere magazine. Rudnick denies he is Libby: "She is a genius. I wouldn't dream of taking credit for work of that caliber." He is too modest; the Rudnick voice can be heard in every purring line. Example: "Howards End transported me, the way movies and catalogs are supposed to; I wanted to call up and order Emma's life, Helena's skin and all the jewelry."

Rudnick lives alone, he says, "because I'm horribly selfish. And when a writer is half of a couple, he gets to be the tormented artiste, and the other has to be endlessly forgiving and supportive. I wouldn't push that on anyone. Mind you, I would welcome a relationship with open arms and clean sheets." But he hasn't set his sights on some mythical Mr. Right. "I think it's so much better to see what happens. One of the wonderful things about love is that it's unpredictable. It doesn't involve a quiz or entrance exam."

That is a notion at the heart of Jeffrey, a play that is all-funny and all- true. "In many ways it's a liberating play for Paul," Selma Rudnick says, "and I'm so happy he was rewarded for it. The world doesn't always reward you for taking such great leaps." In it Rudnick faces up to the challenge his earlier writing implicitly set: how to be sensibly cheerful about a disease that ravages homosexuals.

He does this, ingeniously, by embracing two stereotypes about gay men. One is that they truly love sex -- which gives the AIDS tragedy an ironic cruelness. To stay alive, Jeffrey renounces sex, only to discover that by cutting himself off from his priapic needs, he has cut himself off from life. "Giving up sex is absolutely justifiable these days," Rudnick says, "but it's also a terrible idea. I think it's a universal truth that human contact is an absolute necessity for all people. Whatever it takes, whether it's sex, or a hug, or a touch, it's critical." Jeffrey's eventual decision to once again embrace sex, says Rudnick, "represents a return to humanity."

The second stereotype about gay men is that they are naturally artificially witty. "The gay community has a flamboyant style of humor that I cherish," Rudnick says. "It's a form of gay soul. I hate people who imagine it's simply bitchiness or some sort of ghetto response to intolerance. Nah, it's much bigger than that, and much more fun." It also provides gays with perhaps their sturdiest armor against the gay holocaust. And it is this strength Jeffrey so smartly taps. Most plays about AIDS, including this year's Pulitzer prizewinner Angels in America, send the disease's victims raging or nobly wasting away into the bleak night. They can play Lear or Camille, but they don't get to do Bette Davis. Rudnick believes that "adding to the gloom doesn't help anyone. In fact, you should be constantly striving for the reverse. You don't want to look up from a hospital bed and see people constantly crying." A mope is a most ineffectual nurse.

The author knows this well. Last year, as Norman Rudnick was dying of lung cancer, the family gathered at his bedside. "Some visitors were very quiet and depressed, with their hands folded. But with my mom and my brother and me, I found that the more we laughed and behaved normally -- the more we acknowledged the awfulness but didn't let it become the rule -- the more it helped."

It helped Paul that at the end his father read the Jeffrey playscript and loved it. "It was such a sad time in our lives," Selma says. "There was no time to speak anything but truthfully. We were a very talky family at the end there." She brightens as she recalls, "Paul would come in and tell us what was going on -- sort of the Scheherazade of the hospital."

So here is Rudnick, spinning his bedside stories to people in desperate need of the bright light of his wit. In the age of AIDS, there is something heroic about the task he has set himself: to put the gay back in gay.

With reporting by William Tynan/New York