Rude Entertainment Is an Uneven Evening from the Usually Brilliant Paul Rudnick

Mr. Charles, Currently of Palm Beach is the first of the three one-act plays that make up Rude Entertainment, by the ever delightful and surprising Paul Rudnick, which the Drama Dept. is presenting at the Greenwich House Theater under the direction of Christopher Ashley. It posits an old-fashioned queen (Peter Bartlett) of the white-wine-and-wallpaper school, whose militant refusal to relinquish stereotypical mannerisms has resulted in permanent exile. Since his banishment from New York, he has begun calling himself "Mr. Charles," under which sobriquet he broadcasts a late night cable-access show from Palm Beach, where he now resides, his sole guest being a singularly vacant and nubile go-go dancer named Shane (Neal Huff) and his only props the letters that viewers send him, which Mr. Charles reads aloud on the air, answering their searching questions with unorthodox flippancy.

Example:

"Dear Mr. Charles, What causes homosexuality?"

Mr. Charles (glancing up from the letter): I do.

Most of what Mr. Charles has to say is pretty unorthodox. Much of it is effeminate. Some of it is probably heresy, the high point of the play being a 20-second history of gay theater.

Mr. Charles, Currently of Palm Beach was first presented at the Ensemble Studio Theater in a slightly different form. It was the showpiece of the company's annual one-act marathon in 1998. The first Paul Rudnick play I ever saw was the showpiece of another EST marathon, back in the 80s?a play called Raving, about three precocious and highly competitive playwrights reacting to the favorable Times review that someone else, a newcomer, has received. In addition to being very funny, the play had a slight air of danger about it. New York theater was such a closed shop back then and the mimicry was so apt, so audacious, the personalities of playwrights (one or two of whom you could put names to) and the voices of the critics being lampooned so recognizable.

Mr. Charles created that same feeling three years ago. The fact that it still does may be a sign of how automatic our right-thinking rejection of "gay stereotyping" has become. As written by Rudnick and pitch-perfectly performed and directed by Bartlett and Ashley, the title character is totally unacceptable. He's off the charts, beyond-beyond. Rudnick & Co. aren't just being "politically incorrect," however?at any rate, they're not just doing it for the hell of it. Mr. Charles actually stands for something.

To appreciate what Rudnick is doing, you probably have to go back 20 or 30 years. You have to remember that this arch, mincing figure who seems such a product of benighted provincialism to us now was once an agent of sedition himself, back when American manhood was a more monochromatic affair than it is now. Think of the camp air-traffic controller in the 1980 Airplane! It's hard to remember or to explain to young people today how subversive that performance felt at the time (the actor's name was Stephen Stucker; he died in 1986), how almost incendiary it seemed to plunk down a figure like that among all those stern, masculine types and have him go prancing and skipping about the control tower. Yet how wrong-headed the performance seems now. You can't look at it today without feeling guilty and ashamed.

On the surface this irony might seem to be central to the play: how yesterday's social outrage becomes tomorrow's social embarrassment. But that would be trite. I think this play is a lot angrier than that. It's as though Rudnick had brought the Airplane! character with us into the new millennium, giving him voice, allowing him to grow old. He was always a sociological construct, half put-on, half sincere?a persona designed to shock a hypocritical intellectual class out of its complacency. Rudnick's play makes the case that he still is. Mr. Charles' view?as it emerges at one point in response to a chastising letter from a closeted gay family man arguing that flamboyant old queens like Mr. Charles make it hard for normal gays like himself to lead quiet, conventional lives?is that being normal is not his job.

Trembling with rage (Bartlett actually seems to develop a facial tic at this juncture), and actually standing up to address this point, Mr. Charles announces that he intends to keep right on being flamboyant and effeminate?the conventional gay world (and this correspondent) can do what it pleases. Moreover, Mr. Charles states his intention of remaining a peripheral choric figure who offers arch, caustic commentary as though it were an article of faith and not a matter of style or character, as though he saw this as his moral responsibility, what he was put here on Earth to do.

Mr. Charles seems to be suggesting that the spirit of camp?the exaggerated or effeminate gesture and inflection, indeed, the whole put-on persona of the old-fashioned pansy-queen?has a purpose, a function that is part of the homosexual's duty to fulfill, which is to keep alive a particular brand of self-deprecatory irony and a belief in the inherent value of affectation itself.

This is, in a sense, pure Oscar Wilde. But is it a serious proposition? That the gay male should marginalize himself and remain a perpetual outsider? Does Paul Rudnick believe all this? Of course not. He couldn't possibly. It's not a fate anyone could wish for anyone else and still be humane, still be an artist. There's a lot of passion and eloquence in Mr. Charles' stance. But it's not a viable philosophy, because no one could live like that except a tragic hero. Which is what Mr. Charles is. He represents an impossible, unattainable ideal, a spirit of pure camp for which there is no longer any place, at least not right now. What's interesting about the play are the Wildean paradoxes it throws into relief?about what constitutes honesty and decency and whether a truthful life is something one wants to lead at all.

Of the three plays being presented at the Greenwich, Mr. Charles is undoubtedly the strongest and the most important. The second play, Very Special Needs, is a zany farce on the subject of gay adoption and the real estate crunch. It takes another swipe at the idea of identity politics, featuring Harriet Harris doing an impression of an Eastern European refugee. It's so intricately bound up with other comic elements, most of them pretty loopy and idiosyncratic, that it's some time before you realize that you're laughing at a racial stereotype. Slowly, it dawns on you that Rudnick has written a joke Bosnian with a joke name whom Ashley has dressed in a joke costume and Harris plays with a joke accent and gestures, and that they should all be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. It turns out that Harris is a joke refugee?and to reveal this is to take nothing away from either her or Rudnick, as the play only really gets started with the revelation about who she is. The point is the chastening little lesson it puts you through, seducing you into thinking and behaving like a prig.

But the biggest surprise of the evening, though, is the third play, On the Fence, a mawkish meditation on the subject of gay icons conceived as a three-way conversation among the spirits of Eleanor Roosevelt, Paul Lynde and the hate-crime victim Matthew Shepard. Set (for some reason within a gilt picture frame) during the last moments of Shepard's life, it breaks every rule of dramaturgy Rudnick has always subscribed to, and seems to go against everything he represents. It's obvious, sentimental, politically correct and most uncharacteristically earnest?almost like something Rudnick had written at gunpoint. There's even a hoky sequence in which the houselights come up and the characters in the play all take out pistols and aim them at individuals in the audience?this in the service of demonstrating what it feels like to be a victim.

Rudnick has so much credit with me that I feel convinced that there's more to On the Fence than is coming across. He wants us to see Shepard as a figure of great tragic resonance, which he needn't be in literary or theatrical terms?at any rate, he isn't unless Rudnick makes him one, the way he makes Mr. Charles into a tragic figure. The strange thing is that the subject to which Rudnick devotes endless amounts of philosophical dialogue in the last play?the question of whether one wants to have a life or die a martyr and live eternally as a moral symbol and legend?is the one he explored so brilliantly and provocatively in the first play.

The most perplexing thing about how the evening pans out is the way the last play seems, with its very tone, to cancel out the first. On the Fence is like something written by someone who didn't understand the value that the Mr. Charleses and the Oscar Wildes are actually martyring themselves for. What theater like Wilde's, and for that matter like Rudnick's own, usually, proves again and again is the eloquence of indirection, and the complex figure who can embody more than one idea at once, moving and twisting so that we see different aspects of a question as they come into view. What Rudnick's Mr. Charles represents is inarticulable: it cannot be expressed by any means other than theater. What Matthew Shepard represents can. He isn't himself a complex figure. It's worth noting that when Moises Kaufman, who explored the Matthew Shepard incident so probingly in The Laramie Project, set about using theater to explore the themes it presented, he approached it in a documentary style, basing his text on real interviews with real people and focusing largely on their perceptions of truth.

Paul Rudnick doesn't need me or anyone else to discourse on what is and isn't best represented on a stage. My worry is that he thinks that what he writes most of the time isn't political theater. But just in case he doesn't already know it, I'd like to point out that it is, and that he doesn't need to go out of his way to try to write political theater. He already does it, just naturally. He writes brilliant, witty plays that bother and provoke and surprise an audience and make us question our assumptions and send us out transformed. He always has.

Rude Entertainment, through Oct. 21 at the Greenwich House Theater, 27 Barrow St. (7th Ave. S.), 239-6200.