Marin Ireland and Andrew Burnap in Spain. Photo: Matthew Murphy

It’s not like Spain doesn’t warn you what it’s up to. “A sophisticated, slippery world where the line between truth and fiction is all in the packaging” says the press information, and it’s sure not wrong. But you soon realize that line is just the beginning: Are that “truth” and “fiction” inside the story or in the room with us? Is the fiction that’s being packaged the play itself, the story it tells, or both? Because by the end of the play, playwright Jen Silverman has established that you can’t take this play at face value, over and over again–so the question becomes whether there’s anything left but the “packaging.” Is Spain genuinely asking us to think about the use of art to change minds, or about whether, in the end, art matters more or less than people? Or have we been led down a slippery path to the pure cynicism of the always already manipulated–is it disinformation all the way down? 

The very stylishness and efficacy of Tyne Rafaeli’s production only add to the hall-of-mirrors effect. Several days and a good bit of research later, I’m still turning the play over in my mind, flipping back and forth between its angles and trying to decide whether I feel energized or demoralized by what it’s doing. Not everyone who sees it will have my appetite to turn it into a research project (or, to be fair, a cadre of film-scholar friends who can supply relevant academic articles on demand), but the more I learn, the craftier the play becomes. (Which has its pros and cons; if you knock out that consciousness of some of the layers of truth and fiction, reality and artifice, that the play is trading in, you’re also overlooking a lot of what makes it fascinating.)

At its simplest (not very simple, as you’ll see), Spain is a play about the making of a movie; it’s not explicitly named here, but all the particulars correspond with The Spanish Earth, an actual documentary that came out in 1937, designed to shift American opinions about the Spanish Civil War, and which sparked controversy for its use of historical re-enactment. “The emotive force of Ivens’ film hinges on a complex play between fiction and reality, acting and spontaneity, contingency and calculation,” says Eduardo Ledesma in a 2020 article in The Journal of Spanish Visual Studies.” 

The play is populated by the people who made the real movie: Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens; American writers Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Its central figure is a woman named Helen; her last name isn’t given in the play, but there was a real person named Helen intimately involved with the film, its editor Helen van Dongen, who was later briefly married to Ivens. (Spain’s fifth character, Karl, a KGB official who speaks primarily in Russian till the very end of the play, seems to have no specific analog in recorded history.)

It’s 1936. (Sort of; from the beginning, the idiom is contemporary, the staging sprinkled with visual details that point more toward the now than the then. “You can lie with an image much faster and more cleanly than you lie with a sentence,” says Dos Passos, but when the content of your sentence points you in a different direction than its style, what then?) Joris (Andrew Burnap) starts by telling us, the audience, that the KGB called him in, and told him to make a movie about Spain. (Again, “sort of” 1936; the KGB wasn’t the KGB yet, wouldn’t be the KGB for another twenty years or so, but is calling them that here, a deliberate anachronism? A mistake? A key to the vantage point from which the characters are looking back on this story? A piece of forgivable shorthand when addressing an audience of twenty-first-century Americans who can’t be expected to remember or care that the OGPU became the NKVD in 1934 and not the KGB till after World War II? An intentional choice by Joris, whose main personality trait is likeability, to make things easier for his listeners?) Joris has never been to Spain, and neither has Helen (Marin Ireland), his girlfriend/coworker/fellow Communist agent, and in fact he’s never made a movie longer than twenty minutes. But his Dinner Companion (don’t call him Karl, the name he goes by but which Helen and Joris aren’t supposed to use) tells him that doesn’t matter: the war is awfully complicated if you try to understand it all, and what’s wanted here is a movie about a “single-sentence war.” A war where the poor are fighting the rich, and wouldn’t it be great if Americans sent money, and maybe rethought their noninterventionist stance. Who needs to know anything about Spain? (And Joris and Helen really know nothing about Spain, to a comical degree; if you take various food items off their first brainstorming list, you’re left with the Inquisition, sombreros, and Don Quixote. Which neither of them has read. A tick in the “disinformation all the way down” column, perhaps.)

Joris and Helen, and the screenwriters they enlist, first Dos Passos (Erik Lochtefeld) and then Hemingway (Danny Wolohan), think they’re on the right side: the side of the little people, the side of the revolutionary poor rising up against the oppressive old monarchical order and the proto-fascist Nationalists. That is also the side supported and funded by Stalin’s USSR. And for those who are pro the Spanish Republicans (which few other governments, but many citizens of the USA and other countries, were, among them of course Hemingway, Dos Passos, and George Orwell), Stalin’s NKVD will very soon start to seed dissent among the revolutionaries themselves, claiming that one of the largest small c communist–but anti-Stalinist–parties was actually allied with the Fascists. (Another real person alluded to in the play, who does not appear, is the Spanish writer Jose Robles, a friend of Dos Passos who was executed by the Soviets during the war.) But whose story The Spanish Earth is actually telling, at whose behest, funded by whose money, and made with whose artistic expression serving which purposes–all of that is open to question, both within the play and from our vantage point in the audience. 

And one could–one is in fact encouraged to, by the play’s coda, a slantwise look at the meaning and functioning of the propaganda machine and the function of art–ask the same questions of Spain the play that one asks of The Spanish Earth, and come up with multiple answers: Whose purposes is it serving? Whose story is it telling? Whose vision of art is it espousing? And can we trust any of it–what we see here, the story Silverman is telling, The Spanish Earth, any of the Wikipedia links I have sprinkled so liberally through this review? 

For example: the introduction to Silverman’s script presents it as fact that Joris and his girlfriend were knowing Soviet agents, and that Hemingway and Dos Passos were not; that the film was “conceived and engineered by Soviet agents of the propaganda bureau.” This is not a piece of information you will find any of the aforementioned Wikipedia links, which is not to say it isn’t true–it’s something you can find in scholarly articles, with a little more digging, to be sure–nor even to offer an opinion on the veracity of the assertion. It’s to say “Can a false story be so good that it does something true?” It’s to say, Does art outlive the circumstances of its production, however compromised they may be, and tell its own story? Is it the Russians, in the end, who want us to be seduced by the version of the story where Ivens was working for the Comintern? Is the disinformation that Joris and Helen were Communists, or that they weren’t? “Scholars continue to debate Ivens’s political affiliations and his motivations for making the film,” according to a 2010 article in The Hemingway Review. 

Rafaeli’s production is exceptional, stylized in a way to both resemble the movies of the era in which it’s ostensibly set and to call attention to its own artifice. Most of the scenes involving Karl or other spies are lit by Jen Schriever with sharp side beams and people standing backlit in doorframes, painted only in shades of silver and gray (set by Dane Laffery); Zachary James’s Karl moves as if on a chessboard, only at sharp right angles. The scenes in Helen and Joris’s West Village loft center on a lush red velvet couch in a pool of warm light at center, but deep shadows still lurk in the corners. Alejo Vietti’s costumes put Helen in a palette of rich jewel tones that always includes at least one red, and red likewise punctuates other costumes throughout. Daniel Kluger’s lush sound design and music feel as precisely calibrated to set mood as a film score, bringing by smooth Spanish guitars, staccato drum riffs, busy music that evokes spy films and newsreels depending on the scene.

The actors, too, are always simultaneously negotiating with one another and recalculating the story in their own mind as they narrate it, and Burnap and Ireland in particular rise to the occasion. Burnap lets us feel Joris’s ambition, his pragmatism, and his naivete all at once; Ireland’s Helen is a master strategist, seductive with one hand, sharp with another, always conveying more than she’s willing to say and always calculating before she speaks. Wolohan has perhaps the hardest job, inhabiting a character/persona as well known in caricature as Hemingway, as well as perhaps the play’s hardest monologue, one in which he has to about-face and undercut the vert emotional revelations we’ve just made. 

James’s Karl is an enigma for most of the play–partly because he rarely speaks and mostly in Russian; we hear about him way more than we see him. But he gets the last word on art: “I find it personally valuable, yes . . . meaningless as a means of controlling thought, shifting global power dynamics and impacting governance. But to me, personally, it’s very valuable.” Are we meant to believe this in the end–or is it just another, subtler form of propaganda? Are we meant to come away from Spain warier of anything we see? Convinced of the purposelessness of art? Loving it more for its failure as propaganda? Can we find a way to make art even if it’s utterly compromised; even if we’re being told what to make, does a part of us slip through? Are we forever ruined by the internet and its devolution toward lies-packaged-as-truth? I find myself not quite sure. Is it trying to retcon its own irrelevance, or warn us against being sold that line of goods?

And yet beyond all the large, terrifying, unanswerable, philosophical questions raised by the play, what I keep thinking of is Helen. I just read the nonfiction book Wifedom, an exceptional biography of Eileen Blair, George Orwell’s wife, whose key role in the Spanish Civil War is elided in Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Like Helen, Eileen started out with her own artistic dreams–Helen is, “was,” a filmmaker herself, making artier, more experimental films than Joris’s. Like Helen, Eileen saw her role quickly shifted into logistics, the behind-the-scenes work that made Orwell’s labors possible; like Helen, Eileen was the one who keenly observed and understood people, who knew how to get things done. Like Helen, Eileen was often the only woman in a room full of men talking about war, and the one with the most practical skills to achieve any of their shared goals.

Silverman’s Helen may have given up her art in the service of ideology and pragmatism, but she’s also the one who’s warned by her handler to get out while she can, and she doesn’t. Joris wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning if his role as a filmmaker was taken away from him; Helen does it every day. And yet, she goes to Spain, knowing what she knows, knowing that it’s not hers but it wouldn’t happen without her. Eileen died, far too young, but Helen survives to give us the play’s vantage point, to travel into the future built on her own craft, her own lies. 

In the end, she can’t give up on the artistic project, even if the movies she’s making are “Not the ones I want to. And not the way I want to. But— Joris said this, before. That even this way, a little part of you still slips through.” That’s the hope I want to take away. In the end, film becomes propaganda becomes disinformation becomes becomes irrelevant. I’m not sure I can hold that hope, but I want to.