“Funding is complicated when it comes to the arts,” says a low-budget filmmaker in Jen Silverman’s Spain. This isn’t news at all, but the clever if murky game, which had its world premiere Thursday at the Second Stage Theatreoffers a solution: Let the KGB foot the bill.
According to Silverman, the director, Joris Ivens, a Dutchman working in the United States, is already an undercover agent for Soviet interests when the Spanish Civil War breaks out in 1936. Over a bloody steak in a dim restaurant, his handler “offers” the opportunity to make a pro-Republican big-budget documentary about “The Noble Farmer Crushed by the Rich Fascist.” The goal: to end American neutrality, overthrow Franco, and change the world. The part about communalizing the emerging democracy by any means necessary remains unsaid.
Ivens was a real director and His film ‘The Spanish Earth’, released in 1937, was a real cause celeb among leftists and artists. Enemies Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos wrote the screenplay, Silverman says. The economic role of Soviet intelligence is debatable, but so is the intelligence of those who failed to perceive the threat of Stalinist terror in what was clearly propaganda.
Despite the real names, “Spain” behaves like a work of fiction. Ivens (Andrew Burnap), much honored as an artist in his lifetime, could not be as dim, especially for film, as Silverman makes him. (He imagines shooting part of the documentary from the perspective of an ant or a raindrop.) Nor, for all his faults, was Hemingway (Danny Wolohan) all that funny, devoted to spouting such hollow nonsense. (“We’re all Spain! But how?”) And while turning Dos Passos (Erik Lochtefeld) into a whining milquetoast is a questionable liberty, it’s less problematic than the way he’s set up as the play’s steadfast moral center. His later support for right-wing causes suggests that his own moral center was mobile.
To remedy such a blur, Silverman throws a largely fictional (but somewhat more real) character into the mix. Helen (Marin Ireland) is yet another intruder, tasked with helping Ivens under the guise of being his girlfriend. In Ireland’s typically compelling performance, here tinged with a touch of period arch, she’s fascinating to watch even when she seems stuck with Burnap on a Möbius strip of suspicion and self-doubt. The scenes in which they wrangle over their goals as artists and as citizens – questioning whether making the film can be morally acceptable despite the compromises and risks involved – are the best in the play.
“Can a fake story be so good,” Helen asks, “that it makes something real?”
As for “Spain,” a synthetic thread with too many twists and turns to follow in 90 minutes, the answer to the same question is no. I soon stopped trying to make sense of it, realizing that the story didn’t matter. Ultimately Silverman is less concerned with Russian influence in the Spanish Civil War than with the permanent problem of art in the world. A final gesture takes us even further away from the facts to consider whether Soviet-style propaganda did indeed die with the Soviet Union or simply moved elsewhere, co-opting more artists in the process.
Dramatizing this breezy affair by marrying it to a familiar entertainment standard does neither of them any favors. Silverman’s dialogue has the clipped pace of a screwball comedy, but not the wit — strange, because several of her previous works, such as “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties,” “The Roommate” and “The Moors,” they are so funny. Here, despite the actors’ quite palpable efforts, even the best lines can’t seem to escape the dark gravity of Tyne Rafaeli’s direction.
To be fair, this direction is true to Silverman’s script directions, which emphasize noir thriller conventions. Sure, genre clichés are reproduced too much and apparently not to be intentional: Brutalist black boxes with sliding panels. shadowy figures in evening dress. oblique chiaroscuro fragments; resonant amplification and imposing musical elements. (Sets by Dane Laffrey, costumes by Alejo Vietti, lighting by Jen Schriever, sound and original music by Daniel Kluger.)
The overall effect is heavy and less clarifying than confusing. When we finally see a piece of Ivens’ film—it’s not shown on screen but broadcast live on stage—it’s for some reason an opera, with an aria (“We Pray for Rain”) sung by bassist Zachary James, who otherwise plays a Soviet agent.
We may not intend to analyze the meaning of the scene or anything else in this overloaded endeavor. “Spain” is ultimately a work of propaganda, which is most effective when swallowed whole, if only that were possible.
Spain
Through December 17 at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theatre, Manhattan. 2st.com. Performance duration: 1 hour 30 minutes.