| “So here goes,” says Billy as the play opens.
“My Dad, His Mission, and My Good Deed.” Billy, inspired by
his favorite proto-Romantic boy-poet and imaginary best friend Thomas Chatterton,
is convinced he has an idea that will make his dad happy—“for
like the first time ever.” ’Tis a consummation Billy devoutly
wishes. He’s just disappointed his father woefully by failing to graduate
from high school “because I flunked just about every class I took.”
Samuel is a fanatical believer in the theory that Edward de Vere, the seventeenth
Earl of Oxford—and not “that semi-illiterate seller of malt
from the provinces, William Shakespere”—is the Immortal Bard.
His life’s mission is to find proof. |
| Billy, inspired by Chatterton, contrives a plan that necessitates
a daring bit of seemingly innocent forgery. Threaded through the play are
Billy’s interactions with the starving Thomas and with the Bible-obsessed
teenage Vincent van Gogh, who longs for nothing but to please the poor—and
to win the hand of his unapproachable cousin. Alas, things go horribly awry.
Thomas, “the Marvelous Boy who perished in his pride” dies by
his own hand at the age of 17. Vincent is scorned in love and fired from
the pathetic post he clings to teaching catechism to coalminers. Billy and
Samuel experience first triumph, then ignominy when Billy’s good deed
is revealed as fraud. |
| It’s Vincent who somehow seems to find a way forward
out of the shambles—in a question he poses the prophet Ezekiel about
the confounding behavior demanded of him by Yahweh: “I asked Ezekiel,
Why eat ye dung?” |
