Treason

Sallie Bingham has done extensive research for Treason, a compulsively comprehensive drama that covers 26 years in the life of the extraordinarily controversial poet Ezra Pound. As a result, there’s no reason to believe that the vulpine figure depicted in the two-and-a-half-hour work –and played by Philip Pleasants with energetic conviction — isn’t very like the Idaho native who chose to live abroad much of his life and took to propagandizing on the radio for the Axis powers during World War II. But in her commitment to accuracy and breadth, Bingham apparently forgot that she’s writing a play and not preparing a multi-chapter biography.

The character stalking the Perry Street Theatre stage certainly has the attributes of the actual Ezra Weston Loomis Pound: The encyclopedic knowledge of poetry from Catullus to T. S. Eliot (whose poem The Waste Land he helped edit); the facility to satisfy both longtime wife Dorothy Shakespear (Jennifer Sternberg) and longtime mistress Olga Rudge (Nicole Orth Pallavicini), while dallying with other women drawn mindlessly to him; and the early confidence in his acclaimed Cantos and his growing conviction he’d failed at them.

Most notable, especially for Jewish audiences that might find the play uncomfortable, is
evidence of the virulent anti-Semitism that made Pound infamous, as scrupulously reported here in such statements as “I don’t read the Jew press.” What may not be accurate is the scene where fellow poet Allen Ginsberg (David B. Heuvelman), stopping in to worship at the master’s shrine, hears the depressed 81-year-old Pound say “My worse mistake was that stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.” (The quote is well-known but often contested.)

Bingham has been quite diligent in exploring Pound’s life between 1941 and 1967, covering the trips to Rome from Sant’ Ambrogio, the incarceration at the Pisa Disciplinary Training Center, the 12-year confinement for diagnosed insanity at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D. C., and the returns to Murano and Venice. But there’s no pressing dramaturgical reason for Bingham to cover all that geographical and biographical ground. In doing so, she’s written what amounts to two full-length dramas somewhat entwined like the imagery in Pound’s thousands of lines.

The play she initially seems to be constructing concerns the prickly issue of Pound’s promoting Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government while excoriating the America he insisted he loved. Despite those statements, Pound was never indicted for treason, because he was certified insane by St. Elizabeth’s physician Winfred Overholser (Peter Van Wagner). Whether he was or not, whether he was pretending to be, whether he might have been mad for a time before St. Elizabeth’s but had pulled out of it, or whether Dr. Overholser had political motives for his diagnosis are the possibilities Bingham gives every indication of wanting to set forth and examine.

But somewhere along the way, Treason picks up the threads of the Dorothy-Olga tug-of-war and adds into the mix Mary Rudge (Rachel Fowler), his daughter with Olga, as well as younger mistresses Sheri Martinelli (Kathleen Early) and Marcella Spann (Mary C. Bacon). The former was a student/hanger-on during the St. Elizabeth’s days, when Pound’s quarters resembled rush-hour at Grand Central Station, while the latter was a teacher whom the Pounds retained as an amanuensis. Before you know it, presto-change-o, Bingham’s piece is suddenly a probing look at randy, ready Pound and his women.

But wait, there’s more — as they say in the late-night commercials. The eleventh-hour appearance of Ginsberg could be its own one-act play. During this bizarre sequence, the pot-smoking hippie-scribe renders a prolonged “Hare Krishna Hare Ram” chorus and plays 16 bars or so of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” to the Pounds’ utter mystification. Perhaps Bingham got this god-disciple meeting absolutely right, down to the last recorded detail, but it remains an embarrassing turn that requires much more careful crafting in order to work.

Director Martin Platt, who has been asked to do the virtually impossible here, sets the actors a-twirl on a Bill Clarke set with accompanying projections (by Brian Kim) that has to be many things over 13 scenes. Martha Hally dresses the troupe in period get-ups, Jeff Nellis helps isolate sections of the stage, and Lindsay Jones provides a sound design that includes strains of the Vivaldi violin sonatas that Pound favored. But Pleasants — who is given a role with the large-scale dimensions of King Lear and Don Quixote and who calls to mind John Gielgud playing a role in a production he doesn’t trust — is the best reason to see the production. It’s abundantly clear why he wanted to tackle the role of Pound, whatever the play’s flaws. Indeed, it would practically have been treason not to dive in.