The laugh lines in The New Century pile up quickly, but playwright/screenwriter Paul Rudnick is dealing in quantity, not necessarily quality and not always for the broad audience at GableStage in South Florida. There may be something in the play for almost anyone, but there are stretches when there's almost nothing for everyone. Reaction can be spotty: a couple of guffaws from one part of the audience now, some chuckles from another pocket later.
The intermissionless play is divided into four stand-alone scenes that really are three short plays (set on New York's Long Island, and in Palm Beach, Fla., and Decatur Ill.) followed by a gathering of the main characters in Manhattan.
Heading the cast in the monologue-driven scenes are veteran actors Patti Gardner, John Felix and Sally Bondi, and they can generate some generalized laughter. The message is that the 21st century is one of social acceptance and that we're all likely to be linked by gayness, and not necessarily by six degrees of separation.
The first scene is set at the Massapequa chapter of "Parents of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, the Transgendered, the Questioning, the Curious, the Creatively Concerned and Others" (that isn't the last of Rudnick's lists), and Helene Nadler (Gardner), assures us she's the most accepting mom around. After all, she's got a lesbian daughter, a transsexual son who becomes a lesbian and a son who's into leather and the erotic possibilities of poop. Cue the costumer; there's a fleeting bare-bottomed moment coming from son David.
Next is the heavily pasteled Mr. Charles, ensconced in Palm Beach after being run out of New York by a less flamboyant generation of gays. Now he's got his own local television program, called "Too Gay," and a shallow sidekick named Shane (Daniel Landon, who also plays David, and as Shane gets a few moments of full frontal nudity). Mr. Charles (Felix) revels in his "History of Gay Theater in 60 Seconds," a generation-spanning list of quotesdelivered in semi-subdued style. Among his 3 a.m. viewers is Joann Milderry (played by Jehanne Seralles), who asks Mr. Charles to gay-zap her infant so the child will have as much fun as the gays she's seen.
Then comes Barbara Ellen Diggs (Bondi), craftsperson extraordinaire of the Midwest. She not only lists the many items she's produced to cover all sorts of kitchenware, she has compiled a history of crafts materials through the ages. She travels to Manhattan, where her son dies of AIDS and where she and a brittle New Yorker find common ground under the orange silk of Christo's 2005 The Gates installation in Central Park. Then they all wind up at a hopsital nursery, where there's much zapping of newborns.
