Death watch

Vokes's Montserrat is a tale of torture

by Steve Vineberg

MONTSERRAT. By Lillian Hellman, adapted from the French play by Emmanuel Robles. Directed by John Barrett. Set designed by D. Schweppe. Lighting by Steve Weiss. Costumes by Costumes by Illusions. With Brian Turner, Edward Yopchick, Robert Zawistowski, James A. Barton, Dayle Ballentine, James Mullett, Kate Kelly, John Kennedy Martin, Barry Friedman, Jonathan Ashford, and Barlow Adamson. At Beatrice Hereford's Vokes Theatre, Wayland, through May 17.

Lillian Hellman wrote Montserrat in 1949, adapting a French play by Emmanuel Robes; it was performed on Broadway, with Emlyn Williams in the cast (presumably in the role of the tyrant Izquierdo), and then vanished. Though I thought I knew all of Hellman's work, at least by name, I was unfamiliar with Montserrat until the game, eclectic Vokes Theatre, in Wayland, chose to revive it. It's a political play -- Hellman wrote several in the '40s, including the anti-fascist Watch on the Rhine -- but, in a departure for her, it's also historical. The setting is Venezuela in 1811, during the revolt against the Spanish conquerors led by Simon Bolivar. The title character (played at Vokes by Brian Turner) is a Spanish captain who has fallen in love with Bolivar's revolution and allied himself with it. His superior officer, Izquierdo (Edward Yopchick), unable to secure from him the secret of Bolivar's whereabouts, arrests six innocent people, four men and two women, who have the ill luck to be walking across the square outside, and promises to execute them, one at a time, unless Montserrat gives up the information the Spanish require.

I'm not a fan of Lillian Hellman's; her sanctimoniousness and her uncharitable treatment of many of her characters give me a swift pain. But in something like The Little Foxes or The Children's Hour or Toys in the Attic, she shows a gift for crafting melodrama; the mechanism is so finely tuned that it makes these plays spin, whatever you may think of their content. Montserrat has an elimination gimmick that ought to work: as each of the half-dozen innocents approaches his or her demise, we focus on the quality of these final moments -- their baseness or nobility. It doesn't, though. Maybe you don't expect wit from Hellman (though the opening, before Izquierdo sets his terrible doom on these locals, is surprisingly humorous), but here the dramaturgy is so heavy-handed that you start counting the survivors to figure out how much more of it you have to endure. The play is mired in high-flown talk, and the first three to face execution -- a wealthy merchant (Robert Zawistowski), a self-important wood carver (James A. Barton), and a snobbish actor (James Mullett), the only Spaniard in the group -- are so unlikable that an audience would be hard-pressed to sympathize with Montserrat's struggle over whether or not to send them out to their deaths. This is Hellman at her most aggravating: she writes these characters so she can show contempt for their pettiness. (We're meant to note her superiority to them.)

Turner and Yopchick both have presence, but they aren't asked to show much range in these roles. And the actors who play Izquierdo's victims (the others are Dayle Ballentine, Kate Kelly, and John Kennedy Martin) are truly stuck, because rather than attempt to play against Hellman's increasing histrionics, the director, John Barrett, raises it a notch. There's so much screaming and weeping in the second act that I kept looking away from the poor actors -- usually to the set designed by D. Schweppe, which is low-key but quite handsome.) Jonathan Ashford and Barlow Adamson, as a wise older officer and a callow younger one engaged in a game of chess, get to demonstrate more sides in the relatively brief opening scene, and that's when Turner comes off best, too. I admit to having a low tolerance for overwrought emotionalism on the stage; Montserrat probably wouldn't suit my taste even if it were far more deft than it is. Perhaps others will see more value in its being revived than I could.