A comic take on gay marriage

Playwright Paul Rudnick offers up a comedy about gay marriage and strained friendship.

Early in Paul Rudnick's new play, a man is asked if he ever considered marrying his long-time companion. "If you really want to ruin something," he responds, "just add crab cakes and God."

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It's a line that sets the tone of Regrets Only, Rudnick's comic take on gay marriage, the latest from a playwright who's previously tackled God, AIDS and the closet.

"I love raising the stakes as high as possible because I think that makes the plays funnier and it makes them matter on some level," he says. "There's a certain sense that certain topics are not appropriate for humour - and I've rarely found that to be the case."

The play centres on a wealthy New York couple - he a powerful attorney; she a socialite - and their dearest friend, a clothing designer modelled along the lines of Bill Blass.

The three exist in a fabulous bubble, filled with swanky benefits, luscious cocktails and gorgeous hors d'oeuvres. That is, until the husband is asked - by no less than President Bush - to help write a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage. Can the bonds of friendship endure such a strain? Will this be the issue that finally galvanises the well-fed apolitical to action? You'll have to keep watching - and laughing.

"I certainly wanted to avoid writing anything that was preachy or doctrinaire, no matter what my personal beliefs might be," says Rudnick. "So what I was after was to have a play that dealt with political topics but in terms of the least political people on the planet: Manhattan socialites."

The play, at off-Broadway's Manhattan Theater Club, features Christine Baranski, Diane Davis, George Grizzard, Jackie Hoffman, Sian Phillips and David Rasche.

Despite his crack about crab cakes, it's clear Rudnick backs gay marriage. It's just not an option the playwright - who's gay and is in a 14-year relationship - particularly wants.

"I think it's a very basic and very necessary civil right, but it's one I would certainly never partake of," he says. "Neither my partner or I would ever dream of getting married. I'm not sure why anyone gay or straight gets married."

Look at studies showing marriage rates declining and divorces increasing, he says. "It's always interesting with gay marriage that you have a disenfranchised group saying 'me too' for something that straight people are abandoning," he says. "Gay politics has reached the point where gay people want to have children, serve in the military and get married - actually the most square possible goals imaginable. They suddenly want to become members of the Bush family."

Born in Piscataway, New Jersey, and educated at Yale University, Rudnick has always been drawn to exuberant, clever humour, whether it be in his plays, screenplays or books. The New York Times called him "the man you would most want to ghost-write a wedding toast for you."

"I'm from New Jersey, so I've always had a certain comic distance on the world. I think it's actually very useful to be from New Jersey - a place where you're automatically considered a punch line," he says. "It keeps you humble."

His plays include The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, a retelling of the Bible from a gay perspective, and Jeffrey, an unlikely sex comedy about AIDS that was adapted for the screen in 1995.

During an interview in the theatre's snack bar before a recent performance of Regrets Only, Rudnick, 48, sits unnoticed as the crowd thickens, a wiry, youthful looking man who clearly relishes the turnout.

"In my earlier years, I would watch my plays - always in back - and I would make deals with God. I would say, `If you let the audience laugh at the next line, you can have my right foot.' And by the end of the performance, if things were going well, I would just be a stump," he says. "I eventually realised this was not a particularly mentally helpful form of behaviour. So I've stopped making those deals but I live in constant comic torment."

While the latest play's reviews have applauded Rudnick's adept comedic timing, they've also found problems, with The Associated Press saying Regrets Only suffers from a "a stop-and-go script" and The New York Times complaining that "the characters never seem to come by their big moments of revelation honestly."

Massaging scripts has been something of a Rudnick specialty. He was an uncredited script doctor for the films Sister Act and Addams Family until being asked to formally write the sequel Addams Family Values, a film that took traditional notions of family and turned them upside down. He also wrote the screenplay for The Stepford Wives remake.

Perhaps Rudnick's most representative movie is 1997's In & Out the story of a small-town high school teacher outed on national TV (loosely based on Tom Hanks' Oscar acceptance speech). Now, less than a decade later, Rudnick's discussing gay marriage - a fact that leaves him happily surprised by the pace and growing mainstream acceptance of gays.

"There's always a temptation to call it a bloodless revolution, but of course it wasn't on every level and especially because of AIDS," he says. "If a horrible epidemic can ever be said to have a virtue, it was the fact that it made the closet fairly obscene and it gave gay people more visibility than had ever been possible and in the most abrupt, horrifying and immediate sense."

Christopher Ashley, who is directing Regrets Only and also helmed the film version of Jeffrey, has long admired Rudnick's bravery for writing about issues deemed too scary. "The idea Paul brings to the table is that the most important stuff is the stuff that it is most crucial to laugh about," he says. "It demands comedy, otherwise you end up crying all the time."

Rudnick's more loopy side can be found in his film reviews in Premiere magazine, written under the pseudonym Libby Gelman-Waxner, perhaps the world's most irresponsible film critic. Gelman-Waxner, a fictional Long Island assistant buyer of juniors' active-wear, is likely to rate movies according to how much she wants to date the star or buy Meg Ryan's furniture. "It's fun because she can be completely outrageous," says Rudnick. "Sometimes I will actually disagree with her but she wins. You have that wonderful freedom writing in someone else's voice, who also has a confidence that I lack completely."

Rudnick, whether as Gelman-Waxner or himself, has had his share of criticism from those who don't appreciate his irreverence and remain suspicious of his motives.

"The thing I fear most is people who will come to the theatre with a political correctness scorecard and who will not actually listen to the play, who are saying, `No. That's inappropriate,"' he says. "I think anyone who uses the word 'appropriate' is automatically in big trouble."