Courtesy Photo / Mewborne Photography
Simon Bowler Khan’s Judgement of the Eye will run through Sept. 7 at the Overtime Theater.
After finding limited success with his nostalgia-fueled originals, he began forging works by 17th-century masters including Johannes Vermeer. As part of his practice, van Meegeren purchased 17th-century canvases, made his own brushes from badger fur, mixed paints using period-specific formulas and “aged” his finished works hundreds of years by coating them with phenol formaldehyde resin and cracking them with a rolling pin.
Going to these lengths served van Meegeren well — to the tune of $30 million earned from forged paintings. However, his good fortune ended after World War II, when it was discovered that he’d traded an alleged Vermeer for 137 paintings looted by the Nazis.
Accused of collaborating with the enemy, he narrowly escaped a death sentence by outing himself as a forger and painting a phony Vermeer in a courtroom during his trial.
Subject of the 2016 film A Real Vermeer, this story of deception and intrigue comes to life on stage in playwright Simon Bowler Khan’s Judgement of the Eye, which opens this Saturday at San Antonio's Overtime Theater. The play will run through Sept. 7.
Billed as a “modern take on a historical drama,” the production employs a diverse cast of color and is set “in a literal frame of art.”
While Khan’s script has received accolades and even a Beverly Hills Theater Guild award, Judgement of the Eye makes its world premiere at San Antonio’s Overtime Theater in a production directed by Blake Hamman and starring Josh Davis in the role of van Meegeren.
$12-$18, 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday through Sept. 7 (pay-what-you-will on Thursday, Aug. 22, matinee on Sunday, Sep. 1), Gregg Barrios Theater at the Overtime, 5409 Bandera Road, (210) 577-7562, theovertimetheater.org.
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