The company of At the Barricades. Photo: Pablo Calderón-Santiago

The music playing in the lobby at At the Barricades is (or sounds like) 1930s American folk music. The house music once you enter the space, to sit around three sides of a long rectangle set up as a military barracks, with steps leading up to barricades that mark the far end of Frank J. Oliva’s set, is Rage Against the Machine. It’s easy to look back at history with nostalgia. It’s harder to find the still-burning anger at its heart–but that’s what James Clements and Sam Hood Adrain, writers of and performers in At the Barricades, a “source-based” piece of documentary-esque theater about the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, are trying to bring us. Outside of Rage Against the Machine, though, this is not one of those plays that tries to create immediacy with twenty-first-century slang or attitudes. It’s firmly rooted in its time and place, sometimes to a fault: the language can feel overly formal, emotional states overexplained. But while Clements and Adrain may lean a little too heavily on ideological exposition in the early parts of At the Barricades, it eventually builds to an unflinching and sobering look at the costs of war on both body and spirit. And while the sight of people voluntarily putting their lives on the line to fight for a freely elected government has relevance today, so do some of the play’s harder lessons: that ideological absolutism also comes with a high cost, and that passionate commitment to freedom isn’t necessarily enough to win. 

The hard thing about a historical drama is that there’s no way to guard against spoilers: we know how it turns out. We know who won the Spanish Civil War and that Franco’s dictatorship would last nearly 50 years; we know how Soviet communism turned out and what lessons Mussolini and Hitler learned from Franco’s victory. But the characters in At the Barricades—six members of an International Brigade battalion at the height of the war in 1937-38–know none of this, though the journey of the play is an arc toward disillusionment for most and death for several. It’s both inspiring and wrenching to feel the strength of these soldiers’ commitment to a cause that for most of them could have remained nothing more than a newspaper headline. They’ve voluntarily enlisted, most of them crossing an ocean and surrendering their passports to do so, to fight against fascism. Most of them are active members of the (or a) Communist Party in their country. And yet alongside their utter belief in the anti-Fascist cause they’re fighting for (some of them perhaps taking that passionate belief to a terrifying place) sits their actual experience of war, which ranges from boring to terrifying. 

The show is created in partnership with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives and though it’s drawn from a number of primary sources, including journal entries and letters from real combatants, the characters are amalgamations inspired by real people rather than historical figures themselves. According to the producers, the opening scene, in which each character introduces themselves with a letter home, mostly draws on real letters, but the rest of the characters’ details, actions, and opinions, are built by Clements and Adrain on these foundations. The introductions work like a charm: as each character, standing in a private pool of light, gives us a little taste of what they’re thinking on their way to war, we want to know more. 

The characters built on those foundations aren’t all fully developed from those roots, though. The breakdown feels intentionally schematic, assigning a perfectly balanced array of identities to our six fighters: four men, two women; two black, four white; two Spanish, three American, one British; one dockworker, one college professor; one gay man, one interracial marriage. Diego, the captain (Edu Díaz), has been on the front lines the longest, and is tasked with making a fighting unit out of these nonprofessionals—but he’s also later revealed to be gay and potentially a security threat. Elena (Stephanie Del Bino), also Spanish, was a professor—shocking to some of the Americans, who aren’t used to “lady professors.” Victoria (Chelsie Sutherland), the truest believer in the communist cause (a dyed in the wool Stalinist), is an African American nurse from Arkansas by way of Harlem; barred from the frontlines by her gender, she’s a medic. Walter (Devante Lawrence), an African American hotel porter from Missouri, is fighting for a place he can bring his interracial family (a white wife and their children) to safely. Anthony (Sam Hood Adrain), a white Italian American college student from Brooklyn, is trying to prove himself an adult and a man. And Jim (James Clements), a white Glaswegian dockworker, is out for adventure and self-betterment. 

With these disparate characters and a scene to be set, there’s a lot of exposition to handle at the outset, and while director Federica Borlenghi effectively conveys both the energy and the monotony of the frontlines with her staging, the process of establishing everyone’s relative situations threatens to feel more like a lesson on intersectionality than a piece of narrative fiction. There’s didactic clashes over whether oppression via race, class, or gender is more destructive, and which of those forces have and have not been vanquished in light of the current cause. (The combat units of the International Brigade are integrated by race, for example, but not by gender; the Spanish Elena can fight but the American Victoria is relegated to the medical tent.) There’s the cause they’re fighting for, and whether it’s safe/fair/allowable to police their own ideological purity with violence. But as the play proceeds, it becomes more effective, especially as the tenor shifts to the grueling, numbing effects of war itself: Attrition of troops, supplies, morale. Loss of comrades. Loss of nerve. Loss of certainty. Even if the cause is just, is the price too high?

The production is stylish and cleverly designed: Oliva’s set conveys both the drab claustrophobia of the barracks and the frantic improvisation of the ragtag barricades (especially since the audience hems in the performers, with the entrance to the space requiring audience to cross beneath the barricades). Adrien Yuen’s lighting design smartly uses color and angle to define the spaces and add a sense of the dimness and grime of war; Johanna Pan’s costumes, too, show the strained conditions, with none of the volunteers getting a proper uniform and ground-in dirt on every piece of clothing. But it’s Stephanie L. Carlin’s sound design that most effectively conveys the environment, taking us along with these six fighters until bombs and gunshots start to close in on them. Clements and Adrain don’t always succeed in giving us fully fleshed-out characters, but they do succeed in making us care about the unit as a whole, and feel their fear, their weariness, and their commitment.