Seeing Paul Rudnick’s “Valhalla,” a senior project being staged this week at Yale, will have you trying to stifle bouts of laughter as you think about the show on your walk back from the Whitney Theater. The irreverent play explores the role of faith in our lives, perceptions of homosexuality across classes and the tension between searching for beauty and fulfilling obligations.
A pretty tragic story when you step back to think about it a bit, “Valhalla” raises unsettling questions about how people arrive at conclusions about what they want and who they are, and about how family and societal conceptions can help or hurt the process. It’s scary to weigh the possibility that the values and ideals we tell ourselves we most want may not exist as we imagine them — like Valhalla itself, a heaven of sorts in Norse mythology.
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