Treason

by Sallie Bingham
directed by Martin Platt
presented by The Perry Street Theatre Company

with Mary C. Bacon, Kathleen Early, Rachel Fowler, Damon Gupton, David B. Heuvelman, Nicole Orth- Pallavicini, Jennifer Sternberg, Peter Van Wagner and Philip Pleasants as Ezra Pound.

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This was the first of two plays by Sallie Bingham that Martin would direct for the Perry Street Theatre Company and the last show that would grace the historic stage at 31 Perry Street.

Bingham’s play centers around Ezra Pound and the five most important women in his life. Considered by many to be the most important poet of the 20th Century, Pound was also considered an iconoclast, anti-Semite, racist, and a traitor. Treason takes Pound from his broadcasts for Radio Rome railing against the U.S. involvement in World War II through 1945 when he was arrested and jailed on 19 charges of treason.

Declared "mentally unfit for trial" he was remanded to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington D.C. for 12 years. Released only after a long campaign waged by admires such as Hemingway and Eliot. Treason examines a man who betrayed his country, his art, his wife, his mistress and everyone he knew.

The New York Times said: “The play, superbly acted, with an especially prize-worthy performance by Philip Pleasants as Pound, wastes no time getting down to its business.”

Variety was also enamored by Phil’s performance, writing “His performance as Pound — the brilliant, anti-Semitic American poet — makes it perfectly clear how a man with unsavory ideas can still enthrall everyone he meets. Eyes glittering like jewels, Pleasants fills the character with an equal zeal for every event of his life, which the play tracks in chronological order from his pro-Mussolini days in WWII Italy to his time in an American mental hospital to his convalescence in Venice.

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