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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."