Taos Community Auditorium: "Pound of Flesh"

Ezra Pound bio-play

November 15, 2006

In 1945, poet Ezra Pound turned himself in to U.S. forces. He was incarcerated for 25 days in an open cage at a detention camp near Pisa, Italy, and then confined to a tent. There, he awaited extradition to the U.S. to face charges of treason, punishable by death. He suffered an apparent nervous breakdown and wrote the “Pisan Cantos�: “Cassandra, your eyes are like tigers,/with no word written in them/You also have I carried to nowhere/to an ill house and there is/no end to the journey.�

Pound’s radio broadcasts in Italy during World War II branded him a traitor and a xenophobe. They propound the all-too-familiar international Jewish banking conspiracy theory and advocate as required reading “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,� an alleged handbook for world domination by Jews, most likely fabricated by tsarist secret police in early 20th-century Russia. Usury—that code word for anti-Semitism—is a recurring theme in Pound’s poetic magnum opus, “Cantos� (which included the “Pisan Cantos�).

Not an admirable guy, this Pound, so it’s interesting that playwright Michael Peter Bolus focuses his bio-play, “Pound of Flesh,� on Pound’s imprisonment in the tent, a moment in time when the chauvinistic and brilliant—or mad—poet was perhaps at his most vulnerable, pulled down like a fallen idol. That’s not to say he was humbled; at least, not as portrayed in this production. According to the online Jewish Journal, “Bolus does a remarkable job of capturing the arrogance, the brilliance and the over-the-top hubris of the poet.� Actor-producer Joel Polis says, “You kind of get a sense of the kind of drama queen he was … the kind of condescending, arrogant prick he was.�

“Pound of Flesh� is coming to the TCA at the end of the month, following runs at the Edinburgh Film Festival and the Odyssey Theater in Los Angeles. (The Taos connection? Joel’s identical twin brother, Terry, has bought Steve Rose’s chimney cleaning biz.) “Highly-charged and charismatic� is how L.A. critic Laura Hitchcock described Polis’s portrayal of Pound. Polis admits to enough arrogance that he can identify with Pound, and when he’s seized with contempt for the poet’s intolerance, he reminds himself that “on my worst days, I go off on the fundamentalist Christians like you wouldn’t believe.� At the same time, “there’s something extremely human about him,� according to Polis, which confronts audiences with the conundrum of the humanity of those who deny others their humanity. Or, as Polis puts it, “If you put a human face on evil, can you excuse it or not?�
Pound’s foil in the play, Army Pvt. Cooper (David Mauer), who guards the imprisoned poet, is a “good kid,� according to Polis, whose father taught religious school. He would seem poised to be squashed like a bug by the histrionic poet, but while dwarfed intellectually in the pair’s dialogues, Cooper apparently gains the audience’s sympathy to the extent that he almost wins a standing ovation when he catches Pound making a grammatical slip.

Playwright Bolus, who studied poetry with Derek Walcott and earned his PhD in theater studies at the City University of New York, originally envisioned Cooper as Pvt. Rothberg, a brainy Jewish soldier, the Jewish Journal reports. But the two became talking heads for opposing ideologies, devoid of dramatic tension. Rothberg survives as an unseen friend of Cooper’s, whose influence is considerable, if invisible.

Polis says that when he performed in “Oleanna,� David Mamet’s sexual-harassment drama, “you could see the audience creeping up on you.� Similarly, audiences for “Pound of Flesh� are “really, really listening. Really listening intently.� But Polis, and critics, also allude to moments of laugh-aloud humor.

I hesitate to use the word “relevant,� which casts a dreary pall of earnestness over what seems, in this case, a more fascinatingly complex and challenging drama. Still, watching a real dialogue develop between two characters from dramatically different ideological standpoints and backgrounds may feed a hunger in audience’s souls as a result of listening to too many ideologues shouting each other down in the media.