The first lines of the program, poster, and press release for The Man in the Newspaper Hat proclaim: "Poets Are Not Nice People!" No kidding. No group of people is uniformly nice. But even among poets, Ezra Pound was distinctly not-nice. Though he was a godfather of literary modernism, helping Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, and others learn to write without training wheels, he was also a Nazi sympathizer who signed letters "Heil Hitler" and maintained friendships with prominent members of the Ku Klux Klan. He was arrested in Italy in 1943 for treason—he'd been a propagandist for the Axis powers—and eventually landed in the mental ward of St. Elizabeth's hospital. He stayed there until 1958.

During that time, Pound was visited by poet Elizabeth Bishop (who also worked for the Library of Congress). Their visits—which must have been illuminating, colorful, and disturbing, since Pound was still erudite and passionate about poetry, as well as anti-Semitic and conspiracy-minded—resulted in Bishop's poem "Visits to St. Elizabeths": "This is a world of books gone flat,/This is a Jew in a newspaper hat/That dances weeping down the ward/Over the creaking sea of board/Of the batty sailor/That winds his watch/That tells the time/Of the busy man/That lies in the house of Bedlam."

Salt Lake City playwright Hayley Heaton took Bishop's poem as a jumping-off point to write a two-person play set in Pound's cell. The script is trapped in a kind of game, as Heaton forces Pound (David S. Klein) and Bishop (Lisa Keeton) to have conversations that mention words in the poem—watches, sailors, hats, etc.—and has stilted patches when Heaton imagines the poets talking to each other poetically. Director Katrin Hilbe sometimes lets her two actors slide into the amateurish, grandiose overacting that plagues so many fringe productions. The heart of the play is good. But its elaboration is too precious.