Word: jeffrey
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...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...
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...
...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...
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...
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...