LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Paul Rudnick : Changing the Way America Thinks About Gays

Nowhere has the extraordinary flowering of art on openly gay themes been more evident than in recent American theater, where plays exploring gay themes are helping to transform the role of gays and gay issues in society. In a movement that began with the modern gay-rights movement in 1969, and has gathered momentum since the advent of AIDS, homosexual artists have produced an explosion of important work that has catapulted gay issues into the mainstream of American culture.

No longer are the country’s greatest homosexual writers working under cover, as Tennessee Williams did; and no longer is the work of gay artists necessarily ghettoized as gay art. In fiction, history and biography, gay and lesbian writing is leaving behind the small, independent presses where it began and finding a place in major commercial publishing houses, college classrooms and the libraries of straight readers. With the arts in the vanguard in shifting public sensibilities, concerns once seen narrowly as gay are being embraced as universal. Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” which uses the AIDS epidemic to expose the hypocrisy of American society, won the Pulitzer Prize earlier this month. It is about to open on Broadway and is being hailed as a new American masterpiece.

One of the hotter tickets off-Broadway this spring is “Jeffrey,” playwright Paul Rudnick’s romantic comedy about a gay man who is crazy about sex but swears off it out of fear of AIDS--then has the misfortune to flip for a man who happens to be HIV-positive. The play is an old-fashioned romantic comedy, Gershwin songs and all. But the backdrop is gay America in the 1990s--health clubs, AIDS fund-raisers, memorial services, a masturbation club, a gay-pride march, occasional visits from Mother Teresa.

Rudnick, now being likened to Oscar Wilde, is the 36-year-old, Yale-educated author of the 1991 Broadway play “I Hate Hamlet;” two novels, “Social Disease” and “I’ll Take It,” and the forthcoming film, “Addams Family Values,” due out in November. A spectacularly literate and humorous conversationalist with big brown eyes and an angular, animated face, he was interviewed recently in a small Greenwich Village restaurant on the subject of the explosion of gay themes in the arts and its impact on American culture.

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Question: More and more gay playwrights and other artists are openly addressing gay issues. How is this affecting the arts?

Answer: What once were considered minority voices, whether it’s women like Wendy Wasserstein or African-American writers like August Wilson or George Wolfe or gay writers like Tony Kushner, suddenly these are stories that the world is fascinated by. Because there is a freshness; these are people whose stories were not allowed to be told previously. You have that excitement of characters and thoughts and plot lines that just haven’t seen the light of day. That, aside from any political issues involved, is just exciting theater. And those plays are now being perceived as extremely commercial. . . . It’s almost hard to find a play without a gay character, whether it’s “Heidi Chronicles” or even in Neil Simon--even in “Biloxi Blues” there was a gay character. You no longer need a special dispensation from the theater pope to write on gay matters. So it’s a very exhilarating time to be in the theater. And I think, gradually, it will creep into the other media.

Theater, especially in terms of AIDS, was completely in the vanguard in terms of information. That was when theater suddenly was revitalized, I think, by “The Normal Heart.” No one else would touch that subject. People were, for the first time in decades, looking to the theater for . . . what was happening in the world. There was no other way to get that data. It wasn’t even in the papers that much. Suddenly, theater had this wildly active function; it didn’t seem to be this sort of dead form any more. And that play has been done in hundreds of productions all over the world.

Especially if you take something like “Angels in America,” there’s just this buzz in the air. Theater is talking about matters--gay, straight, whatever--that people want to hear discussed, that they’re confused by, concerned by, that actually could affect their lives. And if they could be told, “Look, this playwright is trying to make sense of it,” that there’s real analysis going on, they’ll go to the theater. There’s that dialogue with the audience.

Q: Are works like those affecting straight artists?

A: Absolutely. I think due to a lot of real activist gay politics and that gay insistence on being recognized, you’re going to have movies like “Philadelphia,” the Jonathan Demme movie--which some people claim was made, in part, because of some of the gay protests over the serial killer character in “Silence of the Lambs.” I don’t know if that’s true, but here you have a very mainstream filmmaker making a studio film with Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington--you can’t get much bigger stars than those--in a film with a main gay character, with a lover, and dealing with AIDS. And I think that’s certainly a response to both public interest in gay topics and pressure from the gay community. . . .

Also, there used to be a feeling that the straight audience wasn’t interested. And I just don’t think that’s true. I find with “Jeffrey,” we’ve had enormous cross-over audiences for all ages and sexes and gender-preference groups. It’s such an insult to the audience to assume they wouldn’t be interested, to assume that people only want to see or read or hear about art from their own apartment, from their own fold-out couch. If that were true, certainly no one would be reading Dickens or Aristophanes any more--because they rarely go to the Pottery Barn.

Q: Does a play serve a different purpose for gay and straight audiences?

A: I think to worry about those issues is sort of condescending to both audiences. . . . I find the audience breakdown is rarely along gender-preference lines. It can be in terms of sophistication. It can be in terms of shared sense of humor--and the gay sense of humor is now pretty much universal. . . . When you have performers who use elements of the gay humor tradition, people like Bette Midler, Sandra Bernhardt, even Robin Williams to some extent, the audience is familiar with what could be termed a gay repartee or a riff. Whether it’s Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde and that tradition--which is also incredibly enduring--people get it.

Q: Are other aspects of a gay sensibility also becoming more common?

A: Yes, I feel the taste level in America is rising precipitously--thanks to gay intervention. The predominance of cotton, at the Gap and Banana Republic. The return of navy. All of these.

Q: Language? Slang? Morality?

A: No, I think one of the few positive side-effects of the AIDS epidemic has been to expose the diversity of the gay community. . . . I think it’s shown people the enormous numbers of gay people and, therefore, that it’s just as diverse a population as any other--that we don’t all own CDs and cotton sweaters and small dogs. . . . So I think in a way maybe there’s a diluting of a gay sensibility due to mass exposure.

The whole question of whether there is a gay sensibility can be debated endlessly. I think there is nothing inherently, genetically there. You’re not born, you know, with an epigram on your tongue and a pair of tickets to the first preview of “Sunset Boulevard” in your mitten. But there are certain forms that I think come from oppression in any minority, . . . that were a byproduct of a certain sort of enforced ghettoization that should be treasured. As time goes by and there’s so much assimilation, you may have to pay a little more attention to preserving some of those great traditions. You know, keeping your Sondheim cassettes dust-free. Those are sublime traditions. . . .

But I think what’s been amazing is the way in which the acknowledgment of gay life is now unstoppable. That the horse is out of the closet. And I think, in part, due to AIDS, because it created a stir in the press, also a certain sympathy, and just you can’t ignore that many sick people. And, suddenly, you can’t ignore the community that’s surrounding them and supporting them, that’s marching on your Capitol. If anything, it just shows that we’re everywhere and we’re not all that different. Only slightly better.

Q: Why did you decide this time to address openly gay themes?

A: I was working on another play that had a gay character who gave up sex in response to AIDS and the last 10 years and everything that’s been cooking. And suddenly that struck me as sort of the essential romantic dilemma of our time and, taking it a step further, the essential romantic comedy dilemma of our time: That that’s the obstacle, gay or straight--the sort of time bomb aspect of sex and of relationships. . . .

But, I also did want to honor the gay community in its humor and its valor and sheer, sort of, fighting microbes with style. I didn’t write with an agenda. I think very few writers do. I think you write because you can’t stop it.

Q: But you probably ask yourself about the effect on the audience.

A: What I did was I decided to trust the audience, thinking if I write a good play, theater-goers of whatever stripe will be interested. . . . I thought there were issues in the play that were far more unpredictable than simply the sexual ones. The use of humor in dealing with AIDS was something that I felt could be very challenging. I had no idea if an audience would laugh, would respond in any way, would be outraged, offended, leave the theater. So I was sort of writing blind in many ways.

. . . I think on the part of the straight audience--certainly its less-prejudiced members--there’s a feeling of really wanting to share things with the gay community, of saying, “Look, can we be a part of this, too? You’re not alone.” You find it in the march on Washington, that it’s not just gay people marching . . . What could be better than that sense of totally inclusive community? . . . . The ideal would be total diversity, total options and celebration. And the elimination of words like acceptance and tolerance, which I think are so obnoxious.

Then the world could be properly divided into “People We Like” and “People We Don’t Like.” Due to, you know, choice of socks, hair style. The real minorities! Justifiable discrimination!

Q: There’s a wonderful bluntness about sexuality in your play. What effect did you hope to have?

A: Well, the play opens with the entire cast in bed having sex with each other. What I love is the audience sort of gasps, collectively, and thinks “Oh, my God, if this is where it starts, where are we going?” Then, they find, a few seconds later, they’re laughing. I wanted to take your worst fears as an audience member and confront them within the first five seconds. And say, “Oooh, don’t worry. It’s OK. It’s funny! We all feel that way.” Also, because it’s a play abut sex and romance, and where those intersect, or don’t, I wanted those levels of suspense and tingle and fizz. . . . It’s not a play about punishing anyone for sexuality, or using it merely to shock; it’s using it as a route to rediscovering romance.

In a weird way, I think that if this were a more sedate play about a man and a woman, the audience would not accept it. They would be way too cynical and way too jaded. They’re so aware of Mia-and-Woody situations and so aware of divorce and abusive men and the women who buy them Father’s Day gifts that they just won’t buy that. But because this is a romance couched in fairly fresh terms, between two guys, one of whom is HIV-positive, suddenly you allow yourself to accept romance and accept a certain level of optimism and a certain level of Gershwin swooniness. And that was something that I was very proud of--that I could have an audience go there and not feel embarrassed and not feel they were being taken.

Q: Are there other ways that gay art has reinvigorated topics that had become stale in a heterosexual context?

A: I think because of AIDS, certainly the treatment of grief and political activity and its place in everyone’s life. And friendship, and the demands you place on friendship, have been so tested in the gay community and often found to be one of the most glorious bonds of all. . . . Something like “Angels in America,” which examines the entire American political spectrum through a gay character like Roy Cohn, who is just such a dream of American corruption--sexual, political, moral, everything--and tells us something about everybody. . . .

In fiction and the novel, I think the other impact of AIDS, particularly: It’s the equivalent of wartime writing. Wars, because they bring such immediate drama and such immediate sense of courage and loss and the preciousness of life and the limits of time, tend to create very strong art and far less navel gazing. Suddenly, when you’re on the barricades or you’re in the hospital or you’re in the graveyard, that’s something to write about. That’s not just a bad call from Mom. So, you have this outpouring. I think because it’s also been proven commercial, everybody responds to that. Because it’s adventure, if nothing else. Sometimes I think, God, poor straight writers. They must be cursing themselves, especially in a year like this where all these awards--Book Critics Circle and everything else--is going to gay writers. They’re thinking, “Hmmm, how can I get my character into the boutique?”

And it’s about time--for there to be a little bit of heterosexual envy.