Get on the Boat: A Full-length Comedy

The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and God has had enough! The Seven Deadly Sins have so overwhelmed the Ten Commandments the Creator is taking the matter of human destiny into His own hands. The most powerful nation on earth has just elected a man to lead them who is the very personification of lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, envy and pride—six out of seven, excellent for a major league hitter, but a disaster for a world in turmoil. God sees no choice but to start over—again. High above Earth in His heavenly home, God instructs his harried assistant Gabriel to find him a good man, not a perfect one, just a decent guy with enough compassion, intelligence and integrity to lead humanity down a more humane path. However, the “chosen one” turns out to be a man with a lot more, commonsense, savvy and independence than God had reckoned for, resulting in a ride that is as haunting as it is hilarious.

David W. Christner was born in Sweetwater, Tennessee and raised in rural Oklahoma. He attended high school in Mountain View, a small farming community situated between the Washita River and the Wichita Mountains in the southwestern part of the state. As a Commissioned Officer in the U.S. Navy, Christner served three years at sea fighting the Vietnam War and two years ashore in Norfolk, VA. After completing his graduate education at the University of Oklahoma, Christner settled in southern Rhode Island and for more than two decades worked as a technical writer, editor and multimedia training developer for a variety of defense contractors and hi-tech multinational corporations during the day and wrote plays and novels at night. His stage plays The Wall, Bui-Doi: The Dust of Life, The Walk, Red Hot Mamas, The Babe, The Bard and the Baron, The Bitch of Baily's Beach, Ezra and Evil, What About Mimi?, and This Blood's For You have been finalists or winners in national/international playwriting competitions. Speculations on the cosmos, sex, war, religion, injustice, environmental exploitation, aging, women's issues, the homeless, the colonial slave trade and capital punishment have formed the thematic content of the plays and novels he has written so far. His plays have been produced in the U.S., Australia, Japan, Belgium, India, Ghana, Great Britain, Singapore and Canada. An Italian translation of Red Hot Mamas by Leonardo Franchini opened in Trento, Italy in 2016. Victor Weber's Russian translation premiered in Tula, Russia in 2016. Christner is theater critic for the Newport Mercury in Newport, RI. Get on the Boat is one of his 20 full-length plays.