MILNER’S CHANGE OF FOCUS : Playwright Takes On Problems of Middle Class in ‘Checkmates’

“I was never a writer who said the middle class should be lined up against a wall and shot,” said Ron Milner.

True. But middle-class concerns never seemed to be at the top of Milner’s agenda, either. His most famous play, “What the Wine-Sellers Buy” (seen at the Mark Taper Forum in 1973), was a tale of ghetto teen-agers, one of whom almost became the other’s pimp.

Milner’s image may soon change. “Checkmates,” opening Friday at the Westwood Playhouse after runs at the Inner City Cultural Center and the EPA Theatre in Chicago, could thrust him into the role of the theater’s primary chronicler of the contemporary black middle class.

Not that Milner approves of the label middle-class . “It’s a one-dimensional phrase,” he said. Indeed, the characters in “Checkmates” haven’t much in common beyond that phrase.

They’re separated by gender and generation. The husbands beef about the wives and vice-versa. Neither couple can cross the age gap far enough to understand the other couple.

Milner believes he can. His age, 49, is midway between those of his two couples. “It’s the only way to be able to see them both,” he said. Furthermore, “I really tried to balance” the perspectives of the sexes. He’s not sure he succeeded. “The women in it (Gloria Edwards and Rhetta Greene) still say it’s chauvinistic, that all the good stuff has been given to the men. I guess I still have remnants of my past.”

That past includes two marriages that ended in divorce. His second wife, whom he married while living in Los Angeles from 1979 to 1981, has a career much like that of the younger wife in “Checkmates.” And like the younger husband, Milner once worked in sales.

Also like his “Checkmates” couples, Milner knows what upward mobility means. Born and raised in a run-down part of Detroit, “I never felt poor. But I had to wait a while to get the things I wanted.”

Now, “my contemporaries are running cities. A former classmate is head of the board of education in Detroit. Some of these people live in nice neighborhoods only a couple of blocks from where we grew up, but it took them 20 years to move those two blocks. And their kids don’t necessarily understand that.”

With the current success in Philadelphia of his gospel musical “Don’t Get God Started” (seen at the Beverly last year) added to that of “Checkmates,” Milner may soon own his own home, something that means more to him than middle class .

Though he bought a home for his mother, he himself still pays rent (in Detroit). In “Checkmates,” the older couple owns a duplex and rents half of it to the younger couple. “I understand the owners better now,” he said.

Milner grew up “in a split home, with my mother and sister.” His father is no stranger, though--”My father now lives with me. He’s a proud old dude, but surprisingly we get along fine.”

At 21, Milner was married, and three children soon followed. But while he worked at odd jobs, “I was sure I was going to be a writer.” In the early ‘60s, he received foundation grants for “a novel which will never be published.” Then he turned to playwriting.

“I thought a play was simply dialogue, that I could write one at lunchtime,” he recalled. He learned that it took longer than lunchtime--and that it was worth it.

His first serious effort, a one-act with the title “Life Agony” (he now chuckles as he says it), was staged at a Detroit coffee house called the Unstable. It was the creative home of “a group of artists who were wild and weird to me.” One of them was young Lily Tomlin, known then as Mary Tomlin. “She was definitely very good even then,” remembered Milner. “She also had beautiful legs.”

But it wasn’t the artists’ reaction to his work that spurred him on. The custodians who stopped sweeping in order to listen to the rehearsals of his play were the ones who really inspired him.

“They had never read (Ralph Ellison’s) ‘Invisible Man,’ but they could listen to my words and see my play. And their reaction was immediate--they either booed or applauded or whatever. I realized that if I’m going to write for them, I’d better write in the oral, participatory tradition rather than a strictly literary one.”

“Checkmates” is less abstract in form than many of Milner’s recent plays. The younger couple’s story is told in a totally “straight-ahead” manner, because “it’s already complicated enough, and I didn’t want to do anything to distort it further.”

“It’s dangerous to identify with (the younger couple), because you can’t tell what they might say or do next. They aren’t fixed. They can’t say, ‘These are the values I stand for.’ The point of the older couple’s lives was to build for the future. Now here is the future, and there are no rules left for the younger couple. At the end, both of them are leaving, yet they have no destination.”

What went wrong? “The words got in the way. We got into dialogues instead of talking to each other. Dialogues are theatrical, adversarial. It became profitable to have something wrong with male-female relations. Think of all the conferences and magazine articles.” But he detects a ray of hope for his younger couple: “Maybe, if we just leave them to work it out on their own, they’ll find a way.”

In the meantime, he hopes audiences find their way to the Westwood and then to an Arena Stage production in Washington next spring, then New York, and then--if all works out--a movie version, the first draft of which he’ll write. Still, he knows from his previous experience in Hollywood not to get his hopes up. “I’ve never allowed them to disillusion me.”

However far “Checkmates” goes, Milner expects it to transcend the “black play” ghetto. “It’s a smaller world than it was 10 years ago,” he noted. “A black playwright no longer has to say ‘I’m human! I’m human!’ ”