Paul Rudnick

In September 2017, Rudnick's play Big Night opened at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles, where it played through October. Wendie Malick starred in this Oscar-themed tragicomedy, described by The Hollywood Reporter as "an often amusing but mostly muddled ensemble piece."

On 26 January 2017, it was announced that Rudnick will write the book for a Broadway musical adaptation of the critically acclaimed novel and film The Devil Wears Prada along with Kevin McCollum as the producer and Elton John as composer. The timeline for the musical will be announced later.

On May 1, 2013, Scholastic published Gorgeous, Rudnick's first young adult novel. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, said that the book included "writing that's hilarious, profane and profound (often within a single sentence.)"

In 2011, HarperCollins published I Shudder, a collection of Rudnick's autobiographical essays, some covering his work on stage and screen, interspersed with fictional pieces depicting Elyot Vionnet, a fictional alter-ego. Since 1998, Rudnick has been a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, mostly of over 50 short humor pieces. His work appears in the collections Fierce Pajamas and Disquiet, Please.

Rudnick's later plays included The Naked Eye, which depicted an extreme photographer along the lines of Robert Mapplethorpe, and in 1998, The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, which was inspired by the fundamentalist remark, "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." In Rudnick's revisionist take on the Bible, God makes Adam and Steve, along with the first lesbians, Jane and Mabel. While the play was protested by religious groups, it moved for a commercial run and the New York Daily News said, "You will find yourself laughing uncontrollably throughout the evening."

In 1993 Rudnick had a breakthrough with his Off-Broadway hit, Jeffrey. At first no theater would produce the play, because it was described as a comedy about AIDS. But after an acclaimed, sold-out run at the tiny WPA Theater in New York City, the show transferred for a commercial run. The play ran from December 31, 1992 to February 14, 1993 at the WPA Theatre. The play transferred to the Off-Broadway Minetta Lane Theatre, running from March 6, 1993 to January 16, 1994. Frank Rich, in The New York Times, called Rudnick "a born show-biz wit with perfect pitch for priceless one-liners". Stephen Holden, also in the Times, said that Jeffrey was "Just the sort of play Oscar Wilde might have written had he lived in 1990s Manhattan." Rudnick won an Obie Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award and the John Gassner Playwrighting Award. The original cast featured John Michael Higgins as "Jeffrey", Edward Hibbert, Bryan Batt and Harriet Harris and was directed by Christopher Ashley.

In 1988, Rudnick began producing satiric film criticism for Premiere Magazine under the name Libby Gelman-Waxner, a deranged Manhattan wife, mother and "Assistant Buyer of Juniors Activewear." A collection of Libby's columns was published in 1994 under the title If You Ask Me, and Janet Maslin, in The New York Times, wrote that, "Mr. Rudnick weaves many a trenchant thought into Libby's comic screeds." Premiere folded in 2007, but Libby resumed writing a monthly column for Entertainment Weekly in 2011 and occasionally contributes reviews to The New Yorker.

In the late 1980s Rudnick moved into the top floor of a Greenwich Village brownstone which had once been the 1920s home of the actor John Barrymore. This inspired Rudnick's play I Hate Hamlet, about a young TV star who, as he's about to play Hamlet, is visited by the ghost of Barrymore. The play was produced on Broadway and became notorious when Nicol Williamson, the actor playing Barrymore, began attacking his co-star in a far too realistic manner during a dueling scene.

Paul M. Rudnick (born December 29, 1957) is an American playwright, novelist, screenwriter and essayist. His plays have been produced both on and off Broadway and around the world, and Ben Brantley, when reviewing Rudnick's The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told in The New York Times, wrote that, "Line by line, Mr. Rudnick may be the funniest writer for the stage in the United States today."