Word: rudnick
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...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...
...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...
...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...