The spirit of Avery Mann is alive, even if not well, while his body lies in repose as his widow, daughter, mother and several other significant women in his formerly abundant life get into the booze and conduct a “ginquisition” to determine just exactly who the hell this man Avery was. On the surface, he was kind and compassionate, but at his core Avery was as distant as a black hole in the deep recesses of space. Avery is none too happy about being the object of such scrutiny; however, aside from trying to explain his side of things to the audience and keeping his former friends from killing one another, there’s not much he can do other than listen. As his psyche gets picked apart by the women who knew him best, Avery comes to realize, that with a single exception, none of them knew him any better than he knew himself. By listening to the women with whom he shared only small bits and pieces of himself, Avery learns a poignant lesson about what he missed in life. David W. Christner was born in Sweetwater, TN and raised in a small farming community situated between the Washita River and the Wichita Mountains in southwestern Oklahoma; in his youth he attended church, picked cotton, plowed fields, harvested wheat, hauled hay and moved irrigation pipe. After a stint with the U.S. Navy in Vietnam and Norfolk, VA, he settled permanently in South County, RI, just across the bay from Newport where he had attended Officer Candidate School five years earlier. 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 and capital punishment have formed the thematic content of the plays and novels he has written so far. In addition to the U.S., his plays have been produced in Australia, Japan, Belgium, India and Canada. "Red Hot Mamas" was recently translated into Russian and Italian for productions in those countries. Christner is theater critic for the Newport Mercury in Newport, RI.