THEATER 183: Poetry On The Menu

Theater #183: Poetry on the Menu Poetry on the Menu

​​​ In January 1967, writer/participatory journalist George Plimpton dreamed up a publicity stunt for heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali. He arranged for him to meet Marianne Moore, decorated American poetess – a showman who creates doggerel rhymes, together with one of the finest true poets in the history of the English language. The pair couldn’t be more opposite – He a gigantic, athletic man of color, at his physicalpeak, age 25, not formally educated, a Muslim, loud, charismatic, a showman with the burgeoning edge for social causes and advocacy; She, elderly, age 80, pasty white, doggedly Presbyterian, incredibly well educated, shy, frail and a kind of dowager spinster. Ali’s poems, so called, which predicted his fights, were little more than expanded limericks. Moore’s balletic verses and images won her the Pulitzer Prize, the National Medal in Literature and almost the Nobel Prize. Theirhost that day, Toots Shor, was a rough New York man of Jewish descent, who rubbed elbows, hosted, drank with, and incurred the wrath of entertainment giants of the first two-thirds of the 20th Century: Frank Sinatra, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn Monroe, etc. The meeting only lasted a few minutes and produced a short poem, “On the annihilation of Ernie Terrell,” Ali’s next title foe. The playwright has expanded the meeting in a deeper way, as a one-act play, using snippets of

Moore’s poetry to frame the time, Ali’s immediate and lasting appeal through his pithy quotes uttered over two decades, and foreshadowing his thoughtful future self.

Bernadette Armstrong directs a cast that includes Omari Williams as Muhammad Ali,  Anne Cooper as Marianne Moore, Gary Lamb as Toots Shor, and Justice Davis as Kandu.

James Anthony Merolla is the playwright. A journalist with a career spanning four decades, he is also a director. His most recent play is Jane Austen Ruptured My Spleen!