c. 1998 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ Playwright Paul Rudnick worships the joke god.

See any of his plays (“I Hate Hamlet,””Jeffrey,””The Naked Truth”) or his movies (“Addams Family Values,””In & Out”), or read the film column he writes for Premiere magazine under the enticing pseudonym Libby Gelman-Waxner, or spend just a few minutes with the man, and soon you are laughing out loud.

Tongue-in-cheek witticisms drop from the 40-year-old Rudnick as easily as the rest of us draw breath.”Jeffrey,”the romantic comedy that won him a 1993 Obie Award for playwriting, actually makes you chuckle about gay love and sex in the age of AIDS _ no small feat.

And Rudnick’s newest endeavor,”The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told,”which opens Monday at off-Broadway’s New York Theatre Workshop, could be his funniest, and his most satirical, work to date.

Set in the Garden of Eden and other Hebrew Bible locales, as well as unbiblical spots like New York City,”Fabulous Story”takes a new look at the original couple. Inspired by a Christian fundamentalist slogan that”God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”_”one of the few known examples of fundamentalist repartee,”says Rudnick _ the playwright thought:”What if you took that remark seriously? What if God did make Adam and Steve, and the first two lesbians _ Jane and Mabel?””So that’s where the play begins,”Rudnick says with a grin during an interview in NYTW’s rehearsal studio.”The more I thought about it, a creation myth involving two gay men is no more absurd than Adam and Eve. The idea that any couple just showed up at God’s Club Med is already pushing it.”So then I thought, well OK, if gay people with a modern Manhattan sensibility created the universe, what would it look like? It would certainly have more accessories, and throw pillows. So the play covers pretty much the entire Old Testament, and also a great deal of it is set in New York.” Rudnick also wanted to explore questions of religious faith. He admits to skepticism.

True, he received religious training as a youngster: Hebrew school, a bar mitzvah. But he learned his bar mitzvah recitation phonetically, from a record _”I had no idea what I was saying. I could have been cursing the community for all I knew.”And”once all my gift checks had cleared, I was out of there. They kept trying to coax me back for young Hebrew dances but, you know, we had TV.”It’s interesting the way (people) cling to elements of traditional religion, or avoid them out of fear,”Rudnick said.”So I wanted to get into that territory. Plus, here I am, a snotty Greenwich Village resident, imagining that I hold a superior opinion with regard to religion to all those people who watch evangelist cable shows. And that’s nonsense. Their points of view are every bit as valid as mine, and we’re probably all deluded.” In a season when Terrence McNally’s”Corpus Christi”drew fire from religious groups for dramatizing a gay Christ figure, a comedy with a gay take on Adam and Eve sounds like it might attract similar lightning.

Rudnick knows comedy can be”wonderfully subversive,”but believes that, while”Jesus can be a real flash point,””Fabulous Story’s”Hebrew Bible subject raises fewer hackles.”Anyway,”he said,”I don’t think those particular sects come below 14th Street. I think the layout of the streets is too complicated for their buses.” He arrives at his sense of humor honestly.”I come from a funny family,”said Rudnick, a Piscataway, N.J., native whose parents were second-generation Polish Jews.”Humor was prized. It was seen as a wonderful defense against self-pity.” But”writing comedy is the hardest thing to do,”he said, if only because an audience’s reaction is immediate and clear.”I don’t think Sophocles had to sit there and say, `Well, are they upset about Oedipus, are people in tears yet?’ But Aristophanes had to say, `Yeah, the crowd likes it.'” After graduating from Yale University in 1977, and hitting New York soon after, Rudnick, for all his talent, wrote a lot of plays that neither he nor producers found exciting. He briefly turned to satirical novels, and the idea for one evolved into his Broadway success,”I Hate Hamlet,”in 1991.

Even now, when he leaves audiences chortling, he says,”I never know what will be funny. You can’t just imagine, `Well, that’s a funny remark, therefore it will be funny on stage.’ It’s got to come from the character, it’s got to serve a larger map. But there’s no real guarantee until the audience laughs.”There are jokes we call rehearsal laughs, where everyone in the rehearsal room is on the floor, rolling uproariously. You get it in front of a crowd and _ dead. And you just want to sue the audience for breach of laughter.”

DEA END GREENE