Agony, ectasy Playwright David Christner sees both sides BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

In Grate Expectations, a one-act play being performed at various churches around the state through November, two angels are having an argument. One of them is bored with heaven, so he wants to stick around on earth, become mortal, and suffer and die again. His temporarily donned flesh and blood has reminded him how good it felt to be alive.

The playwright, David Christner, was playing the defiant angel recently in a Newport church, bickering with his dapper seraphic pal, played by Paul Koumrian. At one point, his heavenly homeless person comes to an illuminating observation about his plight. "It’s the agony that makes the ecstasy so interesting," he declared.

Christner, 61, could have been talking about his writing career when he spoke. He started out writing novels, but not successfully. After the Vietnam War, getting out of the Navy in the mid-’70s, Christner penned the first of what he described as potboiler mysteries. But writing descriptive prose came difficultly to him.

"What really came easy was dialogue," he said. "And so I turned to playwriting about 1978 and wrote a play called Let It Rain, which was published by the Dramatic Publishing Company. That was my first full-length play."

That kickoff play is still being performed now and then at community theaters.

"It was a modern retelling of the Noah’s ark story, where God decides to destroy the world because of nuclear proliferation," he said. "The modern Noah is a psychiatrist in New York who assumes God is crazy because he wants to kill everyone."

The angel play, Grate Expectations, started out a few years ago as a one-act titled Magnificent Obsession, eventually adapted a bit to address the plight of the homeless, the playwright adding an unobtrusive line here and there.

A tall, lanky man with the distinct lilt of the South in his voice, Christner had folded himself onto a park bench in Newport’s Queen Anne Square, outside Trinity Church, where he had just performed Grate Expectations. He has written 18 full-length plays and countless one-acts, including a trilogy set in the Vietnam War. Several of his plays are period pieces, set in such places as Newport and Nantucket. All address social concerns, such as capital punishment and abortion.

And racial discrimination. His play about 18th- and 19th-century Newport’s central role in shipping slaves to America is the focus of A Little Lower Than the Angels, which was reviewed in these pages last week. That play was born after an unusually long gestation period.

"That came home from an incident when I was an undergraduate, where a basketball team and myself were denied service in a restaurant in Oklahoma City because we had a black team member with us," Christner recalled. "That kind of resonated with me for 40 years."

Its opening image, of a slave on an auction block, came from a long-ago sermon that deeply affected him.

"It seems that we haven’t come very far in 200 years since the Civil War, 240 or whatever it is now," he said, "that we still require laws to guarantee people freedom that they’re supposed have anyway. The Founding Fathers founded the country for white businessmen, essentially, because they’re the ones who benefited from everything.

"I don’t know," he began. "Those thing grate on you and you have to get it out. I do that by writing."

Born in Sweetwater, Tennessee, and raised in a southwestern Oklahoma farming community, Christner received a B.A. in psychology and an M.A. in journalism from the University of Oklahoma. Keeping writing as his main focus has been difficult at times.

"Oh, I’ve had awful jobs," he said. "I’ve worked in factories, I’ve driven school buses, I’ve shucked clams. I mean, I have done everything. Always going toward my goal of being a full-time writer. God knows if I’ll make it."

His bread-and-butter work these days has him developing Web-based training for Lockheed Martin, which gives him the time-flexibility he needs to write.

One thing he has learned over the years is that if he wants his plays to keep being produced, he’d better take the trouble to do so himself. So Playwrights Place Productions (playwrightsplace.com) came into being, through which five of his works are being staged between now and next May. Most will be directed by his wife, Linda Thomas, but his plays don’t rely entirely on vanity productions — NewGate Theatre produced that recent play about slavery.

But by and large, "If you want something produced, you’d better do it yourself, otherwise your never going to see it," Christner has concluded. "I waited for about 25 years for Mike Nichols to call me and he hasn’t called yet."

Grate Expectations will be performed on Sunday, November 7 at Channing Memorial Church, 135 PelhamStreet, Newport (401-846-0643); on Sunday, November 14 at the Cathedral of St. John Episcopal Church, 271North Main Street, Providence (401-331-4622); on Sunday, November 21 at the Holy Trinity, 1956 Main Road, Tiverton (401-624-4759); and on Sunday, November 28 at the Old Stone Baptist Church, 7 Old Stone Church Road, Tiverton (401-624-7472). Call for performance times.