Jen Silverman is worried about art. Their savvy, ill-at-ease new play, Spain, finds them perched precariously at the center of an intellectual seesaw, tossing theoretical stones into theoretical buckets at either end. On the one end, as one of Spain’s characters says, “Art is a luxury.†Or worse, to quote another character, “Art is dead.†On the other side of the seesaw: power. Perhaps art—or, at least, the practice of crafting fictions—is not dead at all but vividly potent. “It’s like neurosurgery. Isn’t it?†says a third character. “You get inside somebody’s brain and you rifle around and you change the connections … and then you change them. And maybe? You save their life.†Or, to flip that coin to its much more insidious side, “People think they have their own ideas … But what if I said, the thoughts you have are being formed, shaped, designed to meet a set of specifications, and then served to you. You aren’t having a thought, you’re receiving the thought that someone else crafted for you.â€
For Silverman, there isn’t so much a fine line between art’s life-saving “radical brain surgery†and disinformation’s brainwashing as there is a vast, foggy no-man’s-land, pocked with unexploded mines. That dangerous gray zone is where Spain takes place, its characters groping their way through the murk with broken moral compasses, trying to stay in possession of all their limbs. The play draws from real events: In 1936, the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens (here played with urbane golden-boy energy by Andrew Burnap) made a documentary about the Spanish Civil War, which was currently blazing. The novelists John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway helped put it together. Marc Blitzstein wrote the music; Orson Welles recorded the original narration; the Roosevelts hosted a screening of the movie at the White House before its 1937 premiere. And the whole thing was anti-Fascist propaganda funded by the Soviet government, which had a major foothold in Spain’s “revolutionary†regime.
That’s all true — and it’s just one pebble in the bucket. Stalin’s Kremlin, through the global influence of the Comintern, funded a boatload of American culture. (Because what’s still true now was true then, too: America favors Bucket Number One—“Art is a luxury and only matters insofar as we can sell itâ€â€”whereas Russia goes for Bucket Number Two: “Art is immensely powerful and therefore, like any weapon, must be meticulously controlled and ruthlessly deployed.â€) Crucially, the Comintern sponsored the Popular Front, a large and diverse coalition of progressive American artists, from John Steinbeck and Dorothea Lange to Lillian Hellman, Yip Harburg (who wrote the lyrics to both “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?†and “Somewhere Over the Rainbowâ€), and Hemingway. This complex, possibly horribly compromised mixture of real ideals—social and artistic—with complicity in a larger, conscienceless system of authoritarianism is what interests Silverman. And it is interesting! So why does Spain, which handles such explosive material, often feel like it’s risking so little?
In part, it’s a textural thing. Both Silverman’s script and Tyne Rafaeli’s direction are slick and knowing. Rafaeli riffs on all our noir-ish aesthetic expectations — faces are shadowed under broad fedoras; hidden panels open in the looming black walls of Dane Laffrey’s set to reveal a red telephone or an overcoated figure silhouetted in haze; the original music by Daniel Kluger is smoky and menacing; and, doing the most work of all, Jen Schreiver’s lights slice through the gloom at hard angles, cutting the stage into acute triangles and isolated pools à la Fritz Lang. Meanwhile, Silverman’s characters tend to speak in a breezy, relatable banter — the going trend for contemporary plays set in the past: Everyone wears fun clothes, be they petticoats or high-waisted pants, but sounds like Netflix. Here’s John Dos Passos, or “Dos†(a sympathetic, bespectacled Eric Lochtefeld), describing his best friend, who’s the liberal black sheep of an aristocratic Spanish family:
I’m like:
Pepe, you own fifty million acres and like a
hacienda, basically
or your family does, whatever,
what are you doing scrounging for tenure at Johns Hopkins??
But he’s this total idealist
he’s like: My Family Is Conservative, I’ll Never Accept Their Blood Money
and I’m like
“Okay, Pepe!â€
While this vernacular of “likes†and “whatevers†can be fun, there’s also a postmodern glibness to it, which, along with the production’s clean, genre-canny design, allows us to relax at an ironic distance. We get the language in the same way that we get the aesthetic. At this remove we can chuckle, and we can go, “Hmm†or “Huh,†but we can’t really be hurt or astonished. The play wants to ask big, wrenching questions about the ends to which art and artists are employed, but it also can’t quite give up its own veneer of low-key cool — and so it never becomes, in the words of Joris’s Russian-secret-police handler, Karl (the looming bass-baritone Zachary James), as he describes the type of film Joris should be making: “Very Moving, Visceral and Moving.â€
Even when Silverman goes for sincerity, it feels like they’re holding something back. They get more somber, more verbose, but not more exposed. They write around the cliff rather than leaping from it. It’s a shame, because at the heart of the show is an actor who’s always ready to take the plunge. Marin Ireland plays Helen, Joris’s collaborator, producer, and “assigned girlfriend.†(She’s loosely based on Ivens’s real-life editor, Helen van Dongen, though plenty has been zhuzhed for dramatic purposes.) Like Joris, Helen is working directly for the Soviets, but unlike him, she’s been cut off from the purpose and passion of her life. She’s also a filmmaker—“too experimental†Joris calls her work—but now “Joris makes movies and [she shows] up to parties on his arm.†Helen’s journey from hard-edged, purportedly apolitical, do-the-work-you-can-get-and-get-paid cynicism to devastating ethical crisis is the throughline of Spain. Her torment over what she’s complicit in, in order to keep on “being an artist,†should be enough to leave her, and us, shattered. But somehow, despite Ireland’s great gift for raw intensity, we all stay pretty much intact. She pushes, and the play pushes back.
As a gruff, somewhat goofy but internally tortured Ernest Hemingway, Danny Wolohan is likewise searching for cracks in Spain’s facade. (We know he’s tortured because he tells us he is.) The play alternates between duets or ensemble scenes of increasing tension—as Joris, Helen, Dos, and Ernest all fight to bring their film to life while dealing with the increasingly unignorable presence of the Russian elephant in the room—and fourth-wall-crossing soliloquies. In their own ways, everyone gets one of these solos, even KGB-Karl, and it’s in them that Silverman performs a kind of sincerity strip tease. They get more poetic, ostensibly more profound — it feels like something’s about to be revealed, but the garment never fully slips.
Speaking into an old mic, his voice close and scratchy in our ears, Wolohan’s Hemingway tells us a story: He met a Spanish woman in a bar, and she stared into his eyes and sang a strange, ancient song, and, while she was singing it, she slipped inside his head. “I could feel her,†he insists, all the cultivated machismo gone, “She was looking out from my eyes … and I was her, and also myself, still, but also … her. And then she looked at me … I looked at my face with our shared eyes and I saw things that shook me, shook me to my core … I saw differently and so—for a brief interlude—I became different.â€
We don’t actually need Ernest to follow all this up with the explicit conclusion that art is “radical brain surgery†— but Silverman leans toward making the poles of their own struggle fairly blunt, which means that Spain is often clever without quite being elegant. (There’s a late-breaking twist in the action that especially feels like the overstated punchline to a joke we already understood.) “And yet late at night, every night,†says Helen, “I find myself asking: Can a false story be so good that it does something true? Or are we just telling lies…?†The reason the characters’ arias of vacillating conviction and doubt don’t ultimately break through our sternums—despite the actors’ emotional chops—is that there’s no real vulnerability on display in the writing. It’s craft without guts. Besides, the binary that torments Silverman’s characters is a false one: Is art utterly meaningless, useless, frivolous, impotent? (And, by extension, am I all these things?) Or is it the most powerful—the only thing that matters, the only thing that lasts—and possibly for all the wrong reasons?
The answer isn’t satisfyingly dramatic. It’s neither. It’s both. It’s something else entirely. It’s not only about power. And it’s never actually about you. The writing of The Grapes of Wrath was partly funded by a government that was digging mass graves and disappearing people by the thousands. Theaters that are dedicated to the most progressive ideals order 90 percent of their materials from Amazon, throw $100,000 sets straight in the dumpster after closing, and still can’t figure out how to pay people a living wage. No one is going to the Good Place. As James Baldwin put it, “Once one has begun to suspect this much about the world—once one has begun to suspect, that is, that one is not, and never will be, innocent, for the reason that no one is—some of the self-protective veils between oneself and reality begin to fall away.†For an artist, self-reproach and self-aggrandizement can be two faces of the same mirror. Both are ultimately forms of self-protection.
Spain is at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater through December 17.