While lots of playwrights are flocking to television, Wayne Lemon is going the other way.

PICHI CHUANG/DMN

Wayne Lemon's Jesus Hates Me is playing at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary.

Mr. Lemon wrote and produced TV shows such as Grace Under Fire throughout the 1990s. During the last few years, his first stage comedy, Jesus Hates Me, was developed in readings at prestigious places such as the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Kitchen Dog Theater opened its Texas premiere Friday.

The writer, who grew up the son of a Baptist preacher in Groesbeck, cites two main reasons for turning to the stage: The sitcom, the TV form he excelled in, is a dormant genre right now; and TV is such a collaborative medium that he felt his own creativity was getting lost.

"I wanted to be able to say, 'This is my work. You can't change it!' " Mr. Lemon recalls as he waits for a rehearsal to begin at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary. "You can't do that in TV or the movies. It's way self-destructive."

Mr. Lemon realized how funny he could be as a student at Baylor University, where some of his pranks were so extreme that the college president recommended, er, he move down the highway to the University of Texas. After school, he moved to Los Angeles, where he became a friend and protégé of legendary TV producer Norman Lear, with whom he is still close.

The Texas expatriate worked on many TV series, but only Grace Under Fire really caught fire – and Mr. Lemon left that show at the end of its first season because of conflicts with the star and studio executives.

Like many other Hollywood writers, Mr. Lemon has written a lot of screenplays, too. Several have been lucratively optioned, but none actually filmed.

In recent years, though, the whole Hollywood thing was getting to him. "I was sitting in a comedy room one day saying, 'Can we just not actually have her swallow the bull semen?' and the executive producers voted me down," Mr. Lemon recalls. "I was filled with such self-loathing I went home and threw up."

So Mr. Lemon went back to some memories of his own youth and his complicated relationship to religious questions. He started writing a script he knew could never work on television, and it was actually Mr. Lear who encouraged him to find a place to develop it for the stage.

Jesus Hates Me creates controversy wherever it goes. Mr. Lemon says it is consciously aimed at a very young audience. He has watched audience members in their 20s come out of a performance to speed-dial their friends with the words, "Dude, there's this play you've got to see."

Older, more conservative types sometimes have problems with the material, but the playwright was gratified when a woman who loved the show in Denver identified herself as an Episcopal priest and said it had really made her ponder her faith.

Mr. Lemon is threatening to write a trilogy that would continue with Drive-By Jesus and Personal Jesus, but that probably won't happen anytime soon. "I need to get away from Jesus for awhile," he says.

Email ltaitte@dallasnews.com

PLAN YOUR LIFE

Jesus Hates Me continues through Dec. 16 at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary (The MAC), 3120 McKinney Ave. $15-$20, discounts. 214-953-1055. www.kitchendog theater.org.