Fred
Nuernberg is giving a heroic performance locally in a Canadian play about a
truly great US poet, Ezra Pound,
who was accused of treason following World War II.
Pound exiled himself from the US to
Mussolini’s Italy at age 39,
and throughout the war, he broadcast to American soldiers his messages of
hatred toward Jews and everything associated with Franklin Roosevelt’s
administration. When he was arrested and returned to the US shortly after
the war, at age 60, he was placed on trial to determine whether he was mentally
fit to stand trial on treason charges. Found to be insane, he was incarcerated
for 13 years in a Washington, DC, asylum.
As Shipping Dock Theatre’s excellent
production illustrates, Timothy Findley’s engrossing
play, The Trials of Ezra Pound, not onlydetails but also
embodies the endless contradictions in this true story.
McCarthyism, among
other influences, virtually buried the movement to free Pound, although some of
our greatest writers got him awarded the prestigious Bollingen-Library
of Congress Award for his poetry only two years after
his trials. But Pound’s forbidding persona and
the mixed reactions of even his supporters also helped to obscure his case.
In the play,
we see Pound’s recollections of his trials and the events that led to them. As
in Moises Kaufman’sGross Indecency: the 3 Trials of Oscar Wilde, actual trial-transcripts
are sampled and seen from differing perspectives in highly theatricalized
excerpts, interrupted by Pound’s flashback reminiscences. Barbara Biddy’s
understated direction gives those shifts and changes variety and clarity
without ever seeming gimmicky. But one problem is that we see the drama mostly
from inside Pound’s mind, and it is a fascinating but ugly place.
The trials’ main
question was whether Pound was insane or a traitor. Evidently, he was neither.
Fred Nuernberg plays him as contentious, capricious, intransigent, and
unpleasant, but somehow likable. I doubt that last quality. The real Pound was
undeniably brilliant and self-aware, but also irredeemably bigoted. His
supporters all seemed to appreciate his genius but didn’t necessarily share his
views. The redemption that they provide is their belief that a man should not
be tried or persecuted for his views, however malevolent, without a provable
connection between his menacing ideas and dangerous actions.
Fred Nuernberg’s
involving performance as Pound is all the more remarkable since he stepped in
only days before the opening after Doug Bradburd of Brighton, an Ezra
Pound buff, had to give up the role because of abdominal surgery. Other
standout performances are Virginia Flavin’s Dorothy, Pound’s loving but
long-suffering wife; Roger Gans as poet William Carlos Williams, whose lifelong
friendship overcomes his distaste for Pound’s ideas and behavior; and B.
Anthony Gibson as the hospital custodian who oddly forms a helpful, steadying
relationship with this cantankerous patient.
The solid cast also includes David
Woodworth and Morey Fazzi as the defense and prosecuting attorneys; Leah
Maxwell as a hostile Jewish reporter; Don Anderson as the dignified Chief
Justice; and Alan Frost and Ken Bordner as two psychiatrists with contrasting
beliefs and manners but both determined to save this great poet’s life. Billy
De Metsenaere has an interesting cameo as the psychiatrist who exposes the
previous false diagnoses as efforts to avoid the lethal charge of treason.
Pound says he doesn’t know whether
the insanity verdict — which kept him alive but virtually imprisoned — was
a victory or not. And neither do we. There is much resonance here for our
contemporary governmental thought-control and persecution of opponents, as well
as our growing anti-Semitism and minority-bashing. But Ezra Pound is a riveting
protagonist, because we find it as hard to like him or support his ideas as we
do to approve of punishing, much less destroying, him for his hateful points of
view.
The Trials of Ezra Pound by Timothy Findley,
directed by Barbara Biddy, plays at Shipping Dock Theatre in the Visual Studies
Workshop building, 31 Prince Street, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m.
Sundays through March 6. Tickets with reservation $20; $22 @ door; $12 student w/ID;
$18 seniors on Sunday: 232-2250, www.shippingdocktheatre.org.
This article appears in Feb 16-22, 2005.
