"Regrets Only"
Paul Rudnick
English
2007
Comedy, Satire, Farce/50 Pages/2 Acts
Dramatists
Royalty Fee(s): 75 Dollars per performance
Cast Breakdown: 2 Men, 4 Women
Time and Setting: New york, Ny, (Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side Manhatthan), The Present
Brief Bio of Author-
PAUL RUDNICK (Playwright) plays have been produced both on and off Broadway and around the world. Currently his play The New Century is being staged at Lincoln Center Theatre and his most recent work before was Regrets Only at Manhattan Theatre Club, starring Christine Baranski and George Grizzard. His other plays include Valhalla, The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, I Hate Hamlet and Jeffrey, for which he won an Obie, an Outer Critics Circle Award and the John Gassner Playwrighting Award. His novels are Social Disease and I'll Take It, both published by Knopf. His articles and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New York Times. His is rumored to be quite close to Premiere Magazine's film critic, Libby Gelman-Waxner, whose collected columns have been published under the title If You Ask Me. His screenplays include Addams Family Values, the screen adaptation of Jeffrey and In & Out.
(http://www.americantheatrewing.org/biography/detail/paul_rudnick)
About The Show:
The plot is set in the motion one momentous evening in a lavish Upper East Side apartment. Socialite Tibby McCullough is preparing to go out with her best friend, legendary gay designer Hank Hadley, whose companion of nearly 40 years has recently died. Tibby's daughter Spencer, an ambitious lawyer, comes home and announces her engagement; minutes later, her father Jack, a wildly rich, liberal New York lawyer, gets a call from the President of the United States to help craft a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage. When Tibby and Spencer support Jack's decision to go to Washington, Hank decides to take action -- in a very unusual way.
The play is a miraculous marriage of caricature and character. Rudnick has managed to create six comically extreme people -- including Myra, the McCullough's Jewish maid, and Tibby's shallow mother, Marietta -- who also exhibit genuine human emotions. While the quips fly fast and furiously, Rudnick so effectively plots the piece that the jokes serve a thematic point. Tibby, who's essentially a silly society wife, is eventually given stature. Jack is humbled but not broken; rather, he is educated. Even Spencer and Marietta have their epiphanies.
Rudnick has written a smart play with a several rich conflicts waiting to explode. The only question for the audience is whether he will find a way to tie all of his points and plot strands together before the final blackout -- and the answer is a resounding yes. His major plot twist is no more realistic than his comically overdrawn characters, but that's the brilliance of the piece; the characters and the plot are in perfect balance.
(http://www.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm/story/9495)
