Partner John Raftis
Queer Places:
Yale University (Ivy League), 38 Hillhouse Ave, New Haven, CT 06520
John Barrymore House, 132 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012
Paul
M. Rudnick (born December 29, 1957) is an American playwright, novelist,
screenwriter and essayist. His plays have been produced both on and off
Broadway and around the world, and Ben Brantley, when reviewing Rudnick's
The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told in The New York Times, wrote
that, "Line by line, Mr. Rudnick may be the funniest writer for the stage in
the United States today." Rudnick lives in New York City with his partner
since 1993, John Raftis, a
physician.
Rudnick was born and raised in a Jewish family[1]
in Piscataway, New Jersey,[2]
where his mother Selma was a publicist and his father Norman was a physicist.
Rudnick attended Yale College before moving to New York City, where he wrote
book jacket copy and worked as an assistant to his friend, the costume
designer
William Ivey Long. Rudnick began writing for magazines, including
Esquire, Vogue, Vanity Fair and Spy.
Rudnick's first play was Poor Little Lambs, a comedy about a female
Yale student's attempt to join the Whiffenpoofs, an all-male singing group.
The play's cast included the young Kevin Bacon, Bronson Pinchot and Blanche
Baker. Rudnick then wrote two novels: Social Disease, a
satiric tale of New York nightlife in the vein of
Evelyn Waugh's
Vile Bodies, and I'll Take It, which was a
tribute to Rudnick's mother and aunts and their passionate love of shopping.
The Chicago Tribune called the book "absolutely hysterical" and The
Boston Globe termed it "Flat out hilarious. Sort of what I imagine P. G.
Wodehouse would have written after spending some time in Bloomingdale's."
In the late 1980s Rudnick moved into the top floor of a Greenwich Village
brownstone which had once been the 1920s home of the actor John Barrymore.
This inspired Rudnick's play I Hate Hamlet, about a
young TV star who, as he's about to play Hamlet, is visited by the ghost of
Barrymore. The play was produced on Broadway and became notorious when Nicol
Williamson, the actor playing Barrymore, began attacking his co-star in a far
too realistic manner during a dueling scene.
John Barrymore House
In 1993 Rudnick had a breakthrough with his Off-Broadway hit, Jeffrey.
.
At first no theater would produce the play, because it was described as a
comedy about AIDS. But after an acclaimed, sold-out run at the tiny WPA
Theater in New York City, the show transferred for a commercial run. The play
ran from December 31, 1992 to February 14, 1993 at the WPA Theatre.[3]
The play transferred to the Off-Broadway Minetta Lane Theatre, running from
March 6, 1993 to January 16, 1994.[4]
Frank Rich, in The New York Times, called Rudnick "a born show-biz wit
with perfect pitch for priceless one-liners". Stephen Holden, also in the
Times, said that Jeffrey w was
"Just the sort of play
Oscar Wilde
might have written had he lived in 1990s Manhattan."[5]
Rudnick won an Obie Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award and the John Gassner
Playwrighting Award.[3]
The original cast featured John Michael Higgins as "Jeffrey", Edward Hibbert,
Bryan Batt and Harriet Harris and was directed by Christopher Ashley.
Rudnick's later plays included The Naked Eye, which depicted an
extreme photographer along the lines of
Robert
Mapplethorpe, and in 1998, The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told,
which was inspired by the fundamentalist remark, "God made Adam and Eve, not
Adam and Steve." In Rudnick's revisionist take on the Bible, God makes Adam
and Steve, along with the first lesbians, Jane and Mabel. While the play was
protested by religious groups, it moved for a commercial run and the New
York Daily News said, "You will find
yourself laughing uncontrollably throughout the evening."
Rudnick also wrote Valhalla, an epic which entwined the lives of a
World War II soldier from Texas with Ludwig, the Mad King of Bavaria;
Regrets Only, a drawing room comedy starring Christine Baranski and
George Grizzard; and The New Century, a collection of related
one-acts, which was produced at Lincoln Center and for which the actress Linda
Lavin won a Drama Desk Award. Rudnick has more recently contributed two
pieces, The Gay Agenda and My Husband, to the Off-Broadway
anthology Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays.
Rudnick has worked as an uncredited script doctor on movies including
The Addams Family and The First Wives Club. He was credited as the
pseudonym Joseph Howard for his work on Sister Act, which was
originally intended as a vehicle for Bette Midler; the screenplay went through
many changes, and by the time it became re-fashioned for Whoopi Goldberg he
refused to have his real name associated with it. He received sole writing
credit for Addams Family Values, In & Out, and the screen
version of his play Jeffrey. Rudnick's later screenwriting
forays included Isn't She Great and the remake of The Stepford Wives.
In 2011, HarperCollins published I Shudder, a collection of
Rudnick's autobiographical essays, some covering his work on stage and screen,
interspersed with fictional pieces depicting Elyot Vionnet, a fictional
alter-ego. Since 1998, Rudnick has been a frequent contributor to The New
Yorker, mostly of over 50 short humor pieces. His work appears in the
collections Fierce Pajamas and Disquiet, Please.
In 1988, Rudnick began producing satiric film criticism for Premiere
Magazine under the name Libby Gelman-Waxner, a deranged Manhattan wife,
mother and "Assistant Buyer of Juniors Activewear." A collection of Libby's
columns was published in 1994 under the title If You Ask Me, and Janet
Maslin, in The New York Times, wrote that, "Mr. Rudnick
weaves many a trenchant thought into Libby's comic screeds." Premiere
folded in 2007, but Libby resumed writing a monthly column for
Entertainment Weekly in 2011.
On May 1, 2013, Scholastic published Gorgeous, Rudnick's first young
adult novel. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, said that the book
included "writing that's hilarious, profane and profound (often within a
single sentence.)"
On 26 January 2017, it was announced that Rudnick will write the book for a
Broadway musical adaptation of the critically acclaimed novel and film The
Devil Wears Prada along with Kevin McCollum as the producer and
Elton John as
composer. The timeline for the musical will be announced later.[6]
My published books:
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