This will be my last posting re: this event. I would hope than anyone
interested in Pound make the effort to see this play. After numerous seasons
in overseas theatres it has finally made its way to the United States.....

The Miniature Theatre of Chester, Massachusetts, proudly presents the
American premiere of SIXTEEN WORDS FOR WATER
(a play about Ezra Pound)
by Billy Marshall Stoneking,
July 5-16, 2000.
With a Broadway cast, featuring
Reno Roop, Bonnie Black and Judith Stambler. Directed by Byam Stevens.


Synopsis

1958 - St. Elizabeth's, a hospital for the criminally insane. Ezra Pound,
indicted in 1943 for making anti-American broadcasts over Italian radio,
pled insanity, and has spent the last 13 years incarcerated. Faced with the
ultimate choice - sanity or insanity, a trial and the possibility of the
death sentence, or continued insanity and incarceration in a mental
institution - the poet finds himself confronted with the ancient Aboriginal
myth of the Wandjina, the creation spirits who had their mouths removed for
naming too many things.

A witty and dramatic examination of a man torn between the wealth of his
imagination and the poverty of his politics. A hit in both England and
Australia, now in the U.S. for the first time.

"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

If you are in the Boston or NYC area, or within striking distance of the
Berkshires, don't miss this production.