Mr. Charles, Currently of Palm Beach is the first of three one-act plays that make up the ever delightful and surprising Paul Rudnick’s Rude Entertainment, which the Drama Dept. is presenting at the Greenwich House Theater under the direction of Christopher Ashley. It posits an old-fashioned homosexual (Peter Bartlett) of the white-wine-and-wallpaper school, whose militant refusal to relinquish mannerisms now regarded as stereotypical 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 a singularly vacant and nubile go-go dancer named Shane (Neal Huff), and his only props the letters from viewers that 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 twenty-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-play 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 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 and audacious, the voices of the playwrights and of the critics being lampooned so recognizable.
Mr. Charles, Currently of Palm Beach created that same feeling in the audience at EST 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, respectively, the title character is totally unacceptable. He’s off the charts, beyond-beyond. Rudnick & Co. aren’t just being politically incorrect, though—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 twenty or thirty years. You have to remember that this arch, mincing figure who seems such a product of benighted provincialism to us now was himself once an agent of sedition, back when American manhood was a more monochromatic affair than it is now. Think back to the the 1980 disaster-picture spoof Airplane! and Stephen Stucker’s performance as a flamboyantly camp air-traffic controller. It’s hard to explain to young people today how subversive that was. (Stucker died a few years later in his late 30s, having been—I see from his Wikipedia entry—one of the first actors to publicly acknowledge being HIV-positive.) You can’t look at Stucker’s performance today without feeling guilty and ashamed; and yet how delicious, how almost incendiary it seemed back then to plunk down a figure like that among all those stern, masculine types and have him go prancing and skipping about the control tower.
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 Stucker—or the character he embodied in Airplane!—with us into the new millennium, giving him voice, allowing him to grow old. The figure was always a sociological construct, half candor, half put-on—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’s 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 belief in the inherent value of affectation itself.
It is, of course, pure Oscar Wilde. 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 can (or even 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. Her performance is 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.
The biggest surprise of the evening, though, is the third play, On the Fence, a meditation on the subject of gay icons conceived as a three-way conversation among the spirits of Eleanor Roosevelt, the actor Paul Lynde, and the hate-crime victim Matthew Shepard. Set during the last moments of Shepard’s life, it seems to break every rule of dramaturgy Rudnick has always subscribed to, to go against everything he represents. It’s obvious, sentimental, politically correct, and most uncharacteristically earnest—almost like something he might have written at gunpoint. There’s even a hokey sequence in which the houselights come up and the characters in the play all aim pistols at individuals in the audience to demonstrate what victimization feels like.
Rudnick has so much credit with me that I feel convinced that there must be more to On the Fence than is coming across. He wants us to see Shepard as a figure of great tragic resonance. Shepard is that in the context of life and historical fact. In literary or theatrical terms, though, he can only become a figure of tragic resonance if Rudnick makes him one, the way he makes Mr. Charles into a tragic figure.
It’s strange 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 same one he explored so brilliantly and provocatively in the first play. Given the way the evening pans out, though, 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 ethos that the Mr. Charleses and Oscar Wildes are actually martyring themselves for. What theater like Wilde’s, and for that matter Rudnick’s own, 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.
Paul Rudnick doesn’t need me or anyone else to discourse on what is and isn’t best represented on a stage. My one fear is that he might think that the kinds of plays he usually writes are not political. So in case he doesn’t already know it, I just want to point out that he doesn’t need to go out of his way or do anything differently in order to write political theater. He does that naturally. He can’t help it. He writes brilliant, witty plays that bother and provoke and surprise an audience, make us question our assumptions, and send us out transformed. He always has.