A thick smoke billows over the stage as a character sings an aria in Spanish while holding a plow and then a rifle, in one of the last scenes of “Spain,” a play by Jen Silverman that purports to tell the cloak-and-dagger backstory of the making of a film about the Spanish Civil War.  Odd as it is, that moment is one of the few straightforwardly entertaining scenes in this foggy, talky, untrustworthy play.

Silverman was inspired by an actual 1937 film about the Spanish Civil War, which – as “Spain” relates – was written by Ernest Hemingway and directed by a Dutch filmmaker named Joris Ivens; you can watch “The Spanish Earth” for free on YouTube.

But Silverman and director  Tyne Rafaeli have created a production that’s largely indistinguishable from Cold War/Red Scare propaganda, with ominous Soviet KGB agents (all played by Zachary James) “handling” the filmmaker (Andrew Burnap) as well as the girlfriend (Marin Ireland) whom they selected for him. This is pretty deeply ironic, since Silverman and Rafaeli have told interviewers that the point of “Spain”  is to use the past to explore our present age of misinformation, and to ponder the difference between art and propaganda. It’s the 1937 film we’re clearly supposed to understand as propaganda, but it’s the 2023 play that comes off that way too.

We are not given any evidence that Soviet control and intimidation of the film and the filmmaker, which is the core of “Spain,” is historically accurate, and some indication that the playwright has not done their homework: The characters in this play set in 1936 talk about the “KGB,” which was not what the main security agency for the Soviet Union was called until 1954. The only note in the program, from Second Stage artistic director Carole Rothman, provides no historical context;  indeed, it coyly suggests “you might question what you have just seen. Art can be manipulative, who are the good guys, what’s the real story….” 

In place of historical nuance in the play itself, the creative team gives us the stage equivalent of film noir – shadowy figures in fedoras and trench coats; the designers do fine work theatrically, but it comes at the expense of drama and clarity and history.

Similarly, the five members of the cast are all pros. Marin Ireland is effective as a woman who is herself a filmmaker playing flirtatious, evasive, opaquely dangerous games with the men in her orbit, especially Andrew Burnap, who portrays Joris as a well-meaning, hapless sap – distrustful, suspicious, jealous, unnerved. As they set about to recruit John Dos Passos and his long-time friend and bitter literary rival Ernest Hemingway for the movie, their naïveté about Spain, the country their Soviet handlers have ordered them to film, is played for laughs. Danny Wolohan as Ernest Hemingway  and  Erik Lochtefeld as John Dos Passos also bring out the humor in their contentious banter

Zachary James is both the Soviet agent(s), but also the opera singer who sings (beautifully) the aria in Spanish. Given its placement in the play, we are meant to understand that this is a scene (the only one we see) from the movie they’ve spent the play talking about. Why is this presented as an opera? Is James portraying a different character or is the opera singer just the Soviet agent moonlighting? 

One can argue, I suppose, that the playwright is after something larger and more important than mere facts. Silverman wants to talk about the evolving role of art and the artist in the world: The last scene brings those same 1936 characters into the present more or less (less), with a lecture by the handler as to the inability of the movies to change the world anymore, and the rising significance of the Internet. But the history that Silverman is so airily fiddling with is particularly fraught; the accusation that 1930s leftists were willfully blind to (or even in effect party to) the crimes of Stalin’s dictatorship cannot be responsibly untethered from the McCarthyism of the 1950s that abused those accusations and ruined many lives.

Someone might even claim that “Spain” is deliberately misinforming us about the making of “The Spanish Earth” – that the creative team has purposefully devised “Spain” to be an example of propaganda, a meta-theatrical re-creation rather than just exploration of what the dictionary defines as “Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.”

If so, it didn’t work. The point is unclear, the story confusing.

I will forever admire Silverman’s 2018 play Collective Rage A Play in 5 Betties (which is just part of the 47-word title), a  playful, bawdy, episodic genderqueer/feminist/lesbian comedy. The playwright has earned the right to go with their whims and their passions. All I can say is I look forward to Jen Silverman’s next play.  

Spain
Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater through December 17
Running time: 90 minutes no intermission
Tickets: $66 – $106
Written by Jen Silverman and directed by Tyne Rafaeli.
Scene design by Dane Laffrey, costume design by Alejo Vietti, lighting design by Jen Schriever, sound design and original music by Daniel Kluger
Cast: Andrew Burnap as Joris Ivens, Danny Wolohan as Ernest Hemingway, Marin Ireland as Helen, Zachary James as Karl, and Erik Lochtefeld as John Dos Passos