Common Grace, Common Stage

Curtis Miller on Art, Faith, and the Power of Dialogue

“To everything there is a season,” Qoheleth said, and it may be that the season for Christians as a driving force in theatre is returning. If so, Curtis Miller, screenwriter, playwright, short story writer, and children’s author, believes we must lead with excellence.

“As David Mamet says, ‘my phone can entertain me,’” Miller points out. “If you’re asking people to pay, put on something good.”

Miller, a 2021 regional finalist in the Kennedy Center’s American College Theater Festival, poses the Protestant concept of “common grace,” that God’s undeserved goodness is shown to all people, as a basis for connecting the Christian faith with the wider culture.

Miller has exemplified this cultural outreach more than once. He adapted Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, itself a retelling of the Sophocles original, for performance at Restoration Life Church in Sacramento, California in 2017. Miller found a Christian resonance in the play’s critique of moral relativism. “Some things are objectively wrong, some things are worth dying for,” he summarizes.

His adaptation of the play put the church’s space to creative use. Scenes of approximately 10 minutes in length were staged in different rooms of the church with the audience and cast moving from room to room.

Miller believes that Christians can also play an important role in the current cultural moment by fostering honest, constructive dialogue. His play, All Packed, dramatizes one current division. Hodge, the male lead, is on the verge of proposing marriage to Sierra, the female lead, in March 2020. At the pivotal moment, they receive a text that the city is locking down for Covid. It turns out the two almost-affianced have very different views of the pandemic, its dangers, and the appropriate response. The play takes a humorous look at how the two attempt to bridge their differences.

Miller is developing All Packed with the New Threads Theatre Company in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The company’s founder, Frank Mihelich, plans a “talk back” after the play to foster constructive discussion about the cultural experience of the pandemic. All Packed will be produced at Stage Right Theatrics in Dublin, Ohio, in January 2026.

Live theatre is currently in something of a crisis. Theatre closures during the COVID pandemic put audiences out of the habit of attending live theatre. In addition, many in the theatre world have espoused an almost exclusively one-sided and activist view of current cultural and political issues. “Theatre has become boutique and expensive. It’s full of causes that are elite,” Miller says.

As a culture, we’re missing out on the unique impact and meaning of shared, in-person artistic experience. “Theatre is very concrete and has a real payoff,” Miller observes. “People will sit and give you their attention. There’s something very personal in that.”

Miller believes Christians should recognize there may be audiences hungry for in-person entertainment that isn’t overloaded with “messages” and do the work to earn their attention.

In late March 2026, Miller will teach an introductory playwriting course at the upcoming Vision Christian Writers Conference. Miller believes that playwriting skills and practice can benefit writers in all disciplines. “Playwriting is heavily restricted,” he observes. “It makes you drill down and see what makes a story engaging, what makes for conflict. Anybody can find that valuable.”

Christians with the ambition to “seize the day” in the current cultural turmoil can and should learn from secular counterparts, Miller believes. To this end, he has written Stealing from Pirates, a nonfiction manuscript on dramatic structure and the craft of playwriting. Miller shows playwrights how to learn from the best including David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Anton Chekhov, Annie Baker, August Wilson, and others.

The result of honing artistic skills can result in a thriving theatrical culture informed by a Christian worldview. Miller quotes Proverbs, “A man good at his craft will stand before kings.”

P.S. Check out Miller’s Substack, Shelf of Crocodiles.