Jen Silverman’s play Spain introduced me to a film I had never heard of. The Spanish Earth, released in 1937, was an anti-fascist film made during the Spanish Civil War. This movie was directed by Joris Ivens and written by John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. All three are characters in this fictional retelling.
The key thematic element of Spain is the role of artists in creating propaganda. Mr. Ivens (Andrew Burnap) is being paid handsomely by the Russians to bring the uprising to reflect the side they preferred. Foreign governments mix with Americans to wage opinion wars. Still topical today (and probably forever).
Helen (Marin Ireland) will be assisting Joris under the guise of being his girlfriend. They wax poetic about the morality of what they are doing. “Can a false story be so good that it does something true?” is the point here. It is also the reason for this play’s existence given our world of persistent and deliberate misinformation. You can almost hear the “fake news” and “witch hunts” screaming in the ether.
Spain tends to be a tedious and confusing imaginary tale of the creation of a certain piece of propaganda which has its place in history and can still be viewed on You Tube. The best part of this production is the very cool noir elements of the staging and particularly the lighting (Jen Schriever). Columns of white light traverse the black stage between scenes like a computer scanning for information.
The performances are all solid with Danny Wolohan’s Hemingway a boisterous blowhard treat. His writing partner Dos Passos (Erik Lochtefeld) is an meek sidekick who is overwhelmed by the manly man. This fictionalized recap is less about what happened specifically and more about the obligations of artists shaping the world and its politics.
The earnestness is marred by bizarreness toward the end. Film clips are finally shown accompanied by an aria which is oddly confusing. A final scene thrusts the internet propaganda machine front and center as if we could not make that leap ourselves. It adds nothing and detracts from the stylized environment so carefully calibrated in unearthing this relic and bearing in mind its import today.
Spain concluded its run at the Tony Kiser Theater on December 17, 2023.