By YVONNE FRENCH
A small stage was set with a straight-backed chair, a side table and a portrait of e.e. cummings propped on an easel. Emmy Award-winning actor Anthony Zerbe walked onstage, laid a scrapbook open on the table and mumbled something.
Thus started "It's All Done with Mirrors," a dramatic program celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of poet e.e. cummings.
About 200 people attended the program, billed as "an avalanche of cummings's poetry and prose," in the Mumford Room on March 2. It was presented under the auspices of the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund and Poetry in Motion.
Mr. Zerbe had also presented the program at Harvard University Oct. 14, 1994, the 100th anniversary of e.e. cummings's birth. He and actor Roscoe Lee Browne recently toured the United States in a two-person anthology of poetry in performance titled "Behind the Broken Words." The show included selections by cummings.
"e.e. cummings once said, 'Listen. There's a hell of a great universe next door. Let's go.' Tonight, that universe is here," said Poet Laureate Rita Dove, introducing Mr. Zerbe at the Library.
Mr. Zerbe started with a few biographical notes on cummings (1894-1962), who was born Edward Estlin Cummings in Cambridge, Mass., the son of a Congregationalist minister who taught English and social ethics at Harvard University. After graduating in 1915 and earning his master's degree in literature there in 1916, he began to write poetry.
Influenced by the work of Ezra Pound, cummings began to innovate, manipulating language and typography to offer new ways of presenting poetry on the page. He wrote his name in all lower case letters. "I think it was because his typewriter didn't work," Mr. Zerbe said.
All this was presented with the air of an affable college professor by Mr. Zerbe, who moved quickly back and forth between dramatization and exegesis. "He loved to end his poems with philological puns or witticisms," said Mr. Zerbe, reciting from 95 Poems a work called "55": "may//be be/cause/ever//ybody//wants more/(& more &/still More)what the//hell are we all morticians?"
Explaining that cummings often "went to the other side of the tracks" for material, Mr. Zerbe rendered a series of bit characters in accents ranging from an urban tough to a western wiseacre. He said cummings knew Greek and Latin and loved English. "He loved to play with language."
"Like the burlesque comedian, I am fond of that medium that creates movement ..." Turning to address the mute portrait, he continued, "... this bundle of wishes which I like to call myself."
The title of the program, "It's All Done with Mirrors," came from cummings's play, Him. Other quotes were drawn from his letters and lectures. On the subject of art, he once wrote: "You've got to come out of the immeasurable house of doing and into the house of being. ... There's the artist's responsibility. It's the most awful responsibility in the world. If you can take it. ... Do or undo until you drop."
Mr. Zerbe is himself in the process of doing or undoing. He boasts a long career of performance in television, movies and theater. He received an Emmy Award for his role as Lt. Trench in the television series "Harry-O." Other television roles include that of Teaspoon Hunter in the series "The Young Riders," and appearances on such classic series as "Gunsmoke," "Mission Impossible" and "Murder, She Wrote." He also has appeared on several television movies-of-the-week, including "Treasure Island."
Mr. Zerbe's major film appearances include roles in "The Turning Point," "Papillon," "Cool Hand Luke" and "Licence to Kill."
His stage work includes appearances on Broadway and off- Broadway stages and with leading resident theaters across the country. His Broadway appearances include roles in "Terra Nova," "Solomon's Child," "The Little Foxes" and "Moon Besieged." For five years, he was the artistic director of "Reflections: A New Plays Festival" in Rochester, N.Y., and he is widely respected for his work as a director of new plays.
Cummings's first poems were published in The Dial in 1920. His collections of poetry are Tulips & Chimneys (1922), Is 5 (1926), Him , a play (1927), W (1931) and 1/20: Poems (1936). In 1938 his Collected Poems appeared, and a volume of selected poems, Poems 1923-1954, was published in 1954.
According to former Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz, cummings was "an iconoclast, an individualist, an enemy of systems and restriction and regimentation." Mr. Zerbe appeared to be much the same, whether he was portraying cummings or addressing his portrait, assuming one of his characters or telling about his life. Moving as he spoke around the small stage, Mr. Zerbe said, "For life's not a paragraph/And death I think is no parenthesis," before patting the frame of the poet's picture and exiting stage left.