Theatre in Review

	Philip Pleasants. Photo: Monique Carboni.

Treason (Perry Street Theatre)

One thing you can say about Treason: it's not a whitewash.

Sallie Bingham has taken on the case of Ezra Pound, one of the most troubling figures in modern American literature, and she spares us nothing in her depiction of his selfishness, cupidity, and bigotry. You could call it a warts-and-all portrait-if there was anything besides the warts. The playwright's candor is admirable, except for one little problem: halfway through the first act, you begin to wonder why we need a play about someone as insufferable as Ezra Pound.

Bingham gets right down to business, with the poet giving one of his many radio broadcast supporting the Italian Fascists during World War II. Soon after, she bares his anti-Semitism. ("The Jewish problem is unsolvable--sell them Australia!" he barks) A few scenes later, he defends the Ku Klux Klan--to a black army officer. For most of the running time, however, she concentrates on Pound's agility at configuring the women in his life into triangles. The victim list includes Pound's remarkably complaisant wife, Dorothy; his mistress, Olga Rudge; Mary, his daughter by Olga; the Bohemian painter (and drug addict) Sheri Martinelli; and Marcella Spann, who worked with him on an anthology of poetry. They bicker, complain, rail, and occasionally seduce, but all of them remain the poet's pawns. "Woman is a chaos," he remarks at one point, after a particularly bitter free-for-all, but, in Bingham's telling, it's Pound who is the catalyst for trouble, not the women who devote their lives to serving his needs.

Most of the play's action spans the years just after the war, when Pound, taken into custody by the US Army, was first detained, under horrific conditions, in Pisa, then transferred to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC, where a fictive diagnosis of mental illness allowed him to evade prosecution for treason. The latter scenes feature him holed up at his daughter's castle in the Tyrol and finally in Venice, where Rudge took care of him until the end. It was a life filled with drama--artistic ferment, political transgression, controversial (and even hateful) ideas, and a personal life simmering with nearly constant turmoil. Yet, in Bingham's hands, it comes off as the tale of a randy, shameless old coot who spends the second half of his life abusing and seducing his caretakers, while mouthing off about the Jews and blacks.

It's not surprising that Bingham doesn't deal that much with Pound's work, which is difficult, and his theories, which can seem arcane, but, if you leave that out, all that's left is a rather unpleasant, infantile old goat.

It doesn't help that Bingham's dialogue is loaded with thick dollops of exposition, in which characters reveal things to each other that they've known for years, in order to bring the audience up to speed. There are plenty of dramatic-irony groaners as well-at one point, Olga assures him, "When this is all over, your Cantos will be studied--not Eliot, not Frost." The unfortunate climax--an encounter between a failing Pound and Allen Ginsburg--plays like a sketch from some forgotten early-60s revue. Ginsberg enters carrying a flower, then proceeds to steal Pound's orange juice, roll a joint, swill a glass of champagne in one gulp, chant "Hare Krishna," and groove out to a recording of "Yellow Submarine." Let's hope Bingham never writes a play about him.

Taken as a kind of name-dropping literary soaper (remarks about Joyce, Frost, and Eliot are trotted out at regular intervals), Treason has its moments, but the play is bedeviled by Bingham's inability to carve a coherent dramatic line out Pound's incident-filled life. Furthermore, Martin Platt's direction is so obsessed with pace that most of the big emotional moments are lost in the hurry to get on to the next scene. Fortunately, as Pound, Philip Pleasants gives a performance that is notable for its sustained energy and commitment: One minute, he is declaiming like Roman senator; the next, he's stooped, shuffling, and drawling like a sharecropper. He can go from charm to rage in nanoseconds and he delivers Pound's racist comments with shocking nonchalance. He's the center of attention throughout, which goes a long way to explain why his long-suffering relatives and lovers put up with him. The rest of the cast seem hamstrung by their roles, as Dorothy and Olga, Jennifer Sternberg and Nicole Orth Pallavicni are a pair of drudges, tending to their charge with remarkable detachment. It's never clear why Mary, capably played by Rachel Fowler, adores her father so, given his near-total neglect of her. Both Martinelli and Spann come off as one-dimensional acolytes, through no fault of actresses Kathleen Early and Mary C. Bacon.

The production's design is a significant plus; Bill Clarke's appropriately drab-looking roundup of institutional furnishings is transformed by Brian Kim's projections, which produce split-second shifts from Rome to Pisa, the District of Columbia, the Tyrol, and Venice, while adding plenty of visual interest. In a particularly novel use of projections, as each actor takes his or her bow at the curtain call, an image appears of the real person her or she is playing, along with their dates of birth and death. Jeff Nellis' sensitively rendered lighting adds several layers of shading and detail. Martha Hally's costumes are remarkably detailed and are always appropriate to each of the play's many locations and timeframes. Lindsay Jones blends the strains of Vivaldi and the Beatles, along with radio broadcasts, and numerous other effects into an effective sound design.

In a way, one has to be grateful that Bingham has written a play, and not another one of those portrait-of-the-artist solo shows, but Treason doesn't do nearly enough to make sense of the poet's disordered life. In real-life, Pound must have been pretty hard to take; still, he deserves a better dramatic portrait than this.--David Barbour