The one-liners fly furiously in “The New Century,” Paul Rudnick’s collection of four short plays that SpeakEasy Stage Company is presenting at the Boston Center for the Arts. Once they’ve all landed, you may be left wondering whether they actually add up to much, but while they’re in the air it’s hard to do anything but laugh.

“Make remarks, not war,” declares one of Rudnick’s characters, the flauntingly flamboyant Mr. Charles. The slogan could easily decorate a banner above any of Rudnick’s outlandish but decidedly unmilitant vignettes, from Mr. Charles’s own cable-access show in Palm Beach, where he’s been banished from New York for being “too gay,” to the opening monologue by one Helene Nadler of Massapequa, Long Island, mother of three gay children.

In Helene’s case, there is an actual banner over the stage, and it reads “P.L.G.B.T.Q.C.C.C. & O.” As Helene soon informs us, this stands for “Parents of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, the Transgendered, the Questioning, the Curious, the Creatively Concerned, and Others,” and Helene is here to show us that she is the most accepting, most loving, most liberal-minded mother of all time.

 See Rudnick’s ‘New Century’ is a funny time
Boston Globe, United States -