PAUL RUDNICK

 Playwright Paul Rudnick made his off-Broadway debut in 1982, shortly after graduating from Yale University with a B.A. in theater. Rudnick’s critically acclaimed play, Poor Little Lambs, starred Kevin Bacon, and quickly attracted Hollywood’s notice, only to languish in development. Undeterred, Rudnick turned his hand to gay fiction, writing with 1986’s comic tour de force, Social Disease, the first of two highly praised novels. The second novel Rudnick wrote, published in 1990, was the equally hilarious I’ll Take It. Although this acclaimed author is a playwright at heart, these two Paul Rudnick books proved that his writing talents know few bounds.

Moving from gay fiction back to drama, Rudnick took a wryly comic look at gay relationships during the AIDS crisis with his provocative Obie Award-winning off-Broadway play Jeffrey, which was also adapted into a hit movie in 1995. Rudnick has made several other forays into Hollywood, writing the scripts for Addams Family Values and the romantic comedy In & Out.

Paul Rudnick books and plays have all been widely praised, as was the New Jersey native’s monthly film review column in Premiere magazine, written under the pseudonym Libby Gelman-Waxner. In 2010, Rudnick once again turned his hand to prose, writing a collection of essays entitled I Shudder: And Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey.