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.