Lillian Hellman's Montserrat

English: Statue of Simon Bolivar in Washington DC, USA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Over the weekend I read a play ("an important cultural product") for my poli-sci class.  My first reaction is that Lillian Hellman's Montserrat would be really hard to watch, because it's about psychological torture.  On the other hand, I'd love to see it on stage, because just reading it gave me chills.  The story isn't original to Hellman; she adapted it from a French play back in the 1940s, but it feels like it could have been written now, especially considering all of the horrible things going on in the world.
The play is about a military officer in Venezuela who is hiding Simon Bolivar (if you don't know who he was, look it up like I did).  His superiors know that he knows where Bolivar is, and they also know that physical torture won't get him to give Bolivar away (I'm not sure that's true in real life, but you have to go with it for the sake of the plot), so they devise a diabolical plan:  they grab some innocent passersby at random and threaten to kill them if Montserrat doesn't talk.  Spoiler alert:  he doesn't talk, and they do kill them, one by one.  The suspense is terrific.  The ending is overwhelming (I'm not going to spoil that!). 
It sure beat the hell out of reading the textbook.

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