Meanwhile it’s up to my long-time readers to buy Swan at their local independent bookstore, many still functioning like Garcia Street Books here in Santa Fe, for call-in orders and deliveries. A new independent venture called Bookshop is cutting into Amazon’s nearly monopolistic online bookselling by selling books off their website and returning a portion of the profits to independent bookstores. Bookshop will take almost two million dollars in sales away from Amazon this year—proving that a few of us value fighting the beast over one-click convenience.
This brings me to my play Treason, the story of that ultimate rebel, Ezra Pound. I’ve always thought his Cantos vastly over-rated, but it was his personal story of committing treason against the U.S. during World War Two and his even longer-lasting treason against the three women who loved him that drove me to research—including the torturous reading of The Cantos—and to writing this play.
Seeing Treason go into rehearsal in a loft in downtown New York excited and terrified me.
The role of the playwright during rehearsals is, to say the least, ambiguous; depending on the will of the director, the playwright’s role is either so small as to be nearly invisible, or an important component of the production.
My role lay about midway between these two extremes. The women in the cast tended to turn to me with questions about interpretation of lines. They were all seasoned professionals and often their readings were more perceptive than mine.
The actor who played Old Ez was a rule unto himself. Better known than any of the women, he displayed the extraordinary focus that called for my respect and admiration. During the breaks designated by the Actors Union, when everyone else was snacking and chatting, he retreated behind a curtain to lie down and restore himself. It was a life lesson for me in what it takes to be a serious performer—or a serious actor in any field.
In the end, though, it seemed to me—and this was a relief—that the play I’d labored over for years through many revisions was off and flying on its own. There is nothing like the sensation, for me as a playwright, of letting a play go. It’s scary since its failure or success depends on so many chance elements: the state of the economy—for even off-Broadway tickets are not cheap—the competition, always fierce in New York, from other plays by better known playwrights, the state of the moon, and the stars and the weather—all mysterious and ungovernable. This leads to an almost dizzy sense of freedom for the playwright, who can no longer do anything but sit in her seat on opening night and—in my case—silently mouth the lines I knew so well.
The first act started in darkness after a montage of Mussolini’s Italy and the Allied invasion that backgrounds the action of the play. Two women speak to each other in the darkness; they are Dorothy, Ezra’s wife of thirty years, and Olga, his mistress of twenty years. They often lived in the same house, and they had learned how to get along in what would seem to be an impossible situation.
In the darkness, Dorothy says, “You and I, Olga.”
To which Olga replies, “Yes—you and I, Dorothy, sitting here in the dark, to save electricity.”
And we were off and running.
Ezra’s transcripts which I incorporated from the recordings he did for Rome Radio during this period are full of vile anti-Semitic rants reminiscent of some of the poisoned speech we hear these days. He’s a conspiracy theorist, shouting, “All we’ve got now—it cost us three years of war—is a revelation of hoaxes, designed by the London Times and the rest of the press swine, to conceal the basic issue, which is economic…”
Sound familiar?
A few months ago when a local director here in Santa Fe proposed a reading of Treason I declined the opportunity. I didn’t want to be responsible for putting those words into anyone’s ears.
The play continues through Ezra’s arrest at the end of the war and imprisonment in a cage, his trial in Washington, his acquittal—astonishing!—and his decade in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington as an alternative to a death sentence. And, finally, his last, submerged years with Dorothy in Venice when he was no longer a threat to anyone.
And that reminds me of the day when, walking along a dreary back canal in Venice, I happened to see a sign on a moldering wall. It informed me that a dark apartment on that canal was where Ezra spent the last years of his life.
As I quoted William Carlos Williams at the front of the play, “Time passes and pisses on us all.”
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