Ezra Pound Meets the Aborigines
Sixteen Words for Water
[a play about Ezra Pound]

By Billy Marshall Stoneking

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In 1943, the American poet, Ezra Pound, was indicted by the United States government on the charge of treason. It was alleged that Pound, an American citizen, had made anti-American broadcasts over Italian radio during wartime, and that these same broadcasts had given "aid and comfort" to the enemy. By war's end Pound found himself in the custody of U.S. marshals.

Mindful of the political hysteria of the times, and fearing for Pound's life, his wife, friends and colleagues, urged him to enter a plea of insanity as a means of escaping trial and the possibility of a death penalty. This he did, and the court subsequently upheld the plea. However, instead of releasing him into the care of his wife as had been expected, the government chose to confine him at St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., an institution that housed hundreds of the criminally insane. Pound - "one of the great literary figures of our time" - would remain incarcerated at St Elizabeth’s for nearly thirteen years.

Sixteen Words for Water takes up Pound's life in the final days of his "imprisonment", when the balance between life and death had reached its most critical point. The Ezra Pound of the present play must choose between sanity and the possibility of the electric chair, or insanity and the surety of safety at the expense of freedom. In the midst of this, he finds himself invaded by strange thoughts - memories of the ancient Aboriginal myth of the Wandjina... the creative spirits of the Dreamtime who fashioned the world out of words and who, in the act of naming, threatened the world with chaos.


My creative process & the writing of Sixteen Words for Water

by Billy Marshall Stoneking

I begin with research, research, research, not so much because I am interested in gathering information but because I want to be free of it. I look for contradictions, confusions, chaos. I court them. I love to find experts who disagree. It is really a kind of meditative process. When the "facts" and "counter facts" reach critical mass, they explode, dissolve, and what I am left with is the hint of a voice, a gesture, an impression I can coax into light and sound.

The early drafts of the script are mere lures... super-structures into which I pour my own ideas, propositions, suggestions, nuances, in order to draw out the persons (and voices) that lurk in the dark. Some are more eager than others to tell their stories. Others less trusting. Some extremely shy. I listen. Listen for the characters to interject, disagree, champ at the bit of the script I have so cold-bloodedly fashioned from the conflicting opinions of research and my forgetting. I listen. Listen for the broad rhythms of their speech and physical movements. Their peculiarities. Some times these come stampeding out and I get carried away and go on writing way past the actual stampede. Next day when I return to the script-in-progress, I see it is only the actual stampede I can use... the willful parts must be deleted. I listen and refine. Listen and argue. Listen and dispose of more and more of the cold-blooded wilfullness. It is a stripping away. Stripping away the writerliness, the literariness, all that is an expression of my ego and not the egos of the characters whose voices are a part of me and somehow not me.

I guess what I am talking about is the unconscious. One enters into a kind of dream, a reverie; communes with spirits. Sometimes, often, their voices are audible. I have frequently been heard talking "to myself"... actually I am talking to "them". In the midst of my luring we enter into a kind of marriage. They become more real, more substantial, more interesting, than the people one stands in the queue with at K-Mart. One begins to feel rather fictional oneself in the presence of those heavily materialised masses trudging down Main Street. One loses the self one shows to the world and enters their world, their voices, their fears, their hope.

The Pound play was a four year marriage in which we (Pound and I) often fought most hideously. He offering, then withdrawing assistance. Back and forth. I never bowed to his threats, but I learned his idiosyncracies enough to know how to deal with him. We grew to understand one another. A kind of love-hate relationship. A marriage. When the play was finally produced it was like some horrendous separation. Neither of us wanted it to end quite so soon. Maybe there was more that could have - or should have - been said. But it was over. A divorce without mental cruelty, other than the self-imposed cruelty which occasions all creative acts.



[17th January, 2000] The Irish Times Theatre Awards committee nominated Gail Fitzpatrick for Best Supporting Actress as the Psychiatrist in Celtic Mouse Theatre Company's much-acclaimed production of Billy Marshall Stoneking's play, Sixteen Words for Water. The awards are Ireland's equivalent of the Tonys.


Celtic
Poster from the Irish Production

REVIEW FROM THE IRISH PREMIERE OF
SIXTEEN WORDS FOR WATER

Produced by the Celtic Mouse Theatre Company,
the Crypt Theatre, Dublin.
March-April, 1999


Words
don’t fail
them

SIXTEEN WORDS FOR WATER
Crypt Theatre

This is a beautifully written piece of theatre. The lines crackle with wry wit and poisonous barbs directed at an establishment steeped in conspiracies against 'the people', at least as far as poet, Ezra Pound, locked away for thirteen years in a mental institution, is concerned.

The author, Billy Marshall-Stoneking, uses three actors, Vincent McCabe, Laura Brennan and Gail Fitzpatrick to explore the issue of Pound’s avowed fanaticism.

In the end, one feels, even if against one’s will, some sympathy for his viewpoint which is exposed as being a shock tactic for highlighting the idiocies and inanities of modern society.

All the acting is of a high standard.

Although this brief description makes it sound dreadfully dark, this is, surprisingly, a very funny play.

-MAURICE NEWMANN
(Evening Herald, Dublin)



From The Sydney Morning Herald

Pound for Pound
one of the best

Ezra Pound was an irascible old fascist who was probably the most famous person to be indicted for treason in America during World War II. He was also one of the century's greatest poets, often mentioned in dispatches with the likes of T.S. Eliot, Yeats and James Joyce.

Billy Marshall Stoneking's play, Sixteen Words for Water, is set in St Elizabeth's Hospital for the Insane in Washington, where Pound was effectively incarcerated after the war. An adept bureaucratic application of the Catch 22 principle kept him locked up for 13 years without the benefit of a trial or the unseemly publicity that might have gone with it.

Marshall Stoneking's script is a tour de force. It is dense, evocative and loaded with more intellectual argument than a busload of rabbis. Pound attacks almost every shibboleth of modern social engineering with the pronounced vigour of fanaticism and displays all the aspects of his deranged and ugly anti-semitism.

Simon Chilvers' bravura performance as Pound creates an image of a mighty mad old man who is a cross between a modern-day King Lear and William Blake.

Despite the tension and the seriousness of many of the themes, there is wit aplenty, with more one-liners than the phone book.

Beautifully produced, it will repay more than one viewing or hearing. - MARIUS WEBB


From The Antigonish Review

"Sixteen Words For Water has all the simplicity of Beckett and all the bathos too. Pound is the Ham and Clov, the Nell and Nagg of Endgame. He is victim and persecutor, hero and villain... Stoneking’s play is wonderful theatre and it will remain for a long time the best dramatic portrayal of the grim and tragic figure that Ezra Pound became in the last quarter of his extraordinary life."

- STEWART DONOVAN
The Antigonish Review
St Francis Xavier University
Nova Scotia



Images from the Alleyway Theatre Company's production,
March/April, 2000, Buffalo, New York.


Billy Marshall Stoneking has written in various forms - poetry, plays, fiction, screenplays, historical non-fiction, criticism. He is contributing editor of Suite101.com's Performance Poetry. His published work includes the modern Australian classic, Singing the Snake (Harper/Collins, 1990); and the equally-good, though less-classic, Lasseter : In Quest of Gold (Hodder & Stoughton, 1989). Taking America Out of the Boy, an irreverent auto-fictography, was published by Hodder Spectrum in 1993.

Sixteen Words For Water (published by Harper/Collins in 1991) has enjoyed numerous successful seasons including productions in Dublin, London, Sydney, Perth, Dunedin (New Zealand), Buffalo, and elsewhere. It has been the subject of much discussion and some consternation within the academic community [see article, by Everett Lee Lady, one of Pound's visitors during his incarceration at St Elizabeth's Hospital, and now a professor at the University of Hawaii].



The American West Coast premiere of Sixteen Words for Water was presented by Harlequin Productions in Olympia, Washington, in January/February, 2001.





Reno Roop (as Pound) and Judith Stambler (as Betsy) in the
Miniature Theatre's production of Sixteen Words for Water,
July, 2000.

"Words" mixes poetry, politics - review by Larry Parnass



Tim Robertson as Pound in the 2005 La Mama production, Melbourne

Review of the 2005 Melbourne production of
Sixteen Words for Water, by Helen Thomson


Sixteen Words for Water blog at theatre notes... CLICK HERE


The playscript of Sixteen Words for Water, as published by
Harper:Collins, and signed by the author, is available for $20 (inc p & h)

For more information, contact: Billy Marshall Stoneking




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Want to mount a production of this play?
WRITE TO BILLY at

stoneking31@yahoo.com OR stonekingseminars@hotmail.com




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