THEATER REVIEW : ‘Incommunicado’ Fascinating but Lots of Unanswered Questions

The transformation of poet Ezra Pound into a fascist propagandist during World War II was as potentially dramatic as it was unsettling.

Tom Dulack’s “Incommunicado,” at the Odyssey Theatre, picks up the story after the event--as Pound (Harold Gould) is being held in a U.S. Army prison in Italy. He was incarcerated in a cage, exposed to the elements, alongside G.I.s who were being held for rape and murder.

It’s fascinating, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go quite far enough.

Though Pound was supposed to be incommunicado, Dulack depicts him as carrying on lively conversations with his guard (Gerald A. James) and a fellow inmate (Kevin Vavasseur), who is on his way to a hanging. He also undergoes consultations with the Army counsel (John Shepard) assigned to his case and with an Army psychiatrist (Allan Wasserman).

The attorney recommends that Pound use an insanity defense. He did so, after he was shipped to Washington. It may have saved his life--Pound was committed to a mental hospital.

He hardly seems insane here, however. As played by Gould, he’s a brilliant, caustic observer of everything around him. While acutely aware of what’s happening, he remains curiously blind to why it’s happening. He lives in a moral void. In a program note, Dulack wrote that he sees Pound as “a man who wilfully condemned himself to a Living Hell.”

Dulack’s strategy is initially to lull us into a kind of pity for the great old poet, to charm us with his wit. Sure, he sounds prejudiced, in his comments to the black guard as well as in his remarks about the Jews. But when his attorney tells him about the Holocaust, he appears genuinely surprised. He didn’t know, or so we’re told.

By the time he’s about to leave the prison, he has developed a strand of human interest in his guard. And his argument that he never actually asked American soldiers to betray their country sounds true enough; he was expounding theories, he says, not advocating treason.

But the guard--and Dulack--finally knock out any burgeoning sympathy for Pound by bringing in transcripts of the speeches that Pound gave over Italian radio. They’re full of virulently anti-Semitic nonsense, without a trace of the sophisticated sheen that Pound displayed earlier in the play.

The shock is powerful. If you accept Dulack’s basic decision to restrict the setting of the play to the prison compound, it makes dramatic sense to withhold the most toxic material until the end.

*

Still, the play leaves too much unanswered. It doesn’t begin to explain what, in Pound’s past, may have led him into his moral morass. Dulack also steps too gingerly around a nervous breakdown that Pound suffered. We see him on the verge of a crack-up just before intermission, but we don’t see him in its throes. By the time Act Two begins, he’s back to his former spirits. Did he actually exhibit more signs of insanity than Dulack would have us believe?

Gould’s performance will be enough for many theatergoers; he whips through all of Pound’s intricate language with remarkable fluency, yet he also makes the wordless act of brushing his teeth into a sensual experience. The rest of the cast provides firm support, under the playwright’s direction.

Jerry Rojo’s prison cage is intimidating, though a bit inflexible during the second act. Doc Ballard’s lights and Andrea Centazzo’s electronic score contribute to that sense of a willful inferno.

* “Incommunicado,” Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles. Thursdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Ends May 2. $17.50-$21.50. (310) 477-2055. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.