Playwright Terrence McNally's Christ figure is a character named Joshua, a gay young man born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, in the early 1950s. He flees Corpus Christi in search of a more accepting environment, gathering along the way a group of disciples who are bound to him by his message of love and tolerance. Joshua delivers his Sermon on the Mount, but, inevitably, radical teachings will not deliver him from his fate.