Theatre in Review: Spain (Second Stage) The care and handling of historical material is an ongoing challenge for playwrights. Stick too stodgily to the historical record and you might bore the audience; reach too insistently for contemporary relevance and you risk ending up with an ahistorical hash. (Shakespeare got away with murder in this regard, but few can imitate him.) The latter danger hovers over Spain, in which playwright Jen Silverman focuses on a prime slice of twentieth-century political-cultural history -- and, with a dedication that borders on the perverse -- removes almost everything interesting about it. The subject is This Spanish Earth, a 1937 documentary by Joris Ivens, a prolific leftist filmmaker who remained starry-eyed about Communism until he died in 1989. The film, which tracks a group of farmers trying to keep their lands irrigated amid the chaos of the Civil War, was largely intended as propaganda for the Republican side. It was supported by a galaxy of cultural stars -- including Lillian Hellman, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Archibald MacLeish, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Marc Blitzstein, and Virgil Thompson -- all of whom provided financial and/or creative support. The film was highly praised by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, although, within a few years, Ivens returned to Europe, his political sympathies stymying his career in the US. The making of This Spanish Earth offers a fascinating snapshot of the era's politically committed intellectual establishment, many of whose members would soon fall out as news of Stalin's show trials and other atrocities came to light. But you will find little of this in Spain, which eliminates most of these bold-face names while often dismayingly reimagining the few who remain. Joris -- who, at this point, had more than two dozen films to his name -- is seen as a slacker émigré in Greenwich Village, living with Helen, a frustrated filmmaker, in a relationship arranged by their Soviet handlers. (Helen is, presumably, Helen van Dongen, who edited This Spanish Earth and, nearly a decade later, married Ivens.) The script's notes insist that the film was conceived by Russian agents, which explains the many scenes of Joris and Helen slinking around the dark corners of Dane Laffrey's set, meeting with sinister trenchcoated figures who resemble Rocky and Bullwinkle's Boris Badenov, only taller. In what may be the playwright's oddest decision, Joris and Helen are reduced to hucksters, willing to do business with a communist dictatorship for the job opportunities the arrangement provides. This is made stunningly clear in a series of exchanges that do nothing to make them interesting. Exhibit A: "Look," Joris says, "Yes, they sort of specialize in middle-of-the-night secret assassinations, but they've funded a lot of my films, which -- you know, financing is complicated when it comes to the arts." Yes, what are a few actual shootings when there is footage to be shot? Exhibit B: Joris admits that he believes in the Russian cause "because I make movies." "If somebody else gave you money?" Helen counters, adding, "The French or the British or --?" "Then I'd make their movies," he concedes. "Even when you're being told what to make?" Helen asks. "Even then, he replies, "a little part of you still slips through -- a little part of you gets lodged in the camera lens in what people see and how they see it -- and you still, in tiny ways, live." One imagines such self-justifications are heard in the writers' rooms of mediocre TV series. Exhibit C: Helen, who is hardly immune to the glamour of their tawdry trade, says, "People think they have their own ideas or that ideas just...appear in the world around them organically. But what if I said, the thoughts you have are being formed, shaped, designed to meet a set of specifications, and then served to you? You aren't having a thought; you're receiving the thought that someone else crafted for you." And, apparently, the content of the message doesn't matter at all. Enduring these Olympic-level moral gymnastics quickly becomes tedious since the characters' arguments are so transparent. In any event, the project gets off to a halting start, Joris and Helen being startlingly clueless about the subject assigned to them. In one scene, they wrestle with a concept board, amassing a list of typical Spanish cliches, including paella, sangria, and Don Quixote, the latter of which is immediately dismissed because neither of them has read it. ("Are flutes Spanish?," Helen wonders, idly.) Clearly, in need of expertise, they reach out to Dos Passos and Hemingway, who become competing contributors to the script. Dos Passos, who will get iced out because of his growing skepticism about Soviet manipulation of the Spanish conflict, is the most interesting of Silverman's characters, especially as played by Erik Lochtefeld. Dressed fussily in a suit-tie-and-sweater combination -- costume designer Alejo Vietti gives each character a distinct personal style -- he is coiled with tension even when seated, his distaste for the project growing visibly. (He tells Helen that his friend, the writer and academic José Robles, has been murdered by the Russians; she dismisses this as an unimportant detail that shouldn't distract from making their all-important film.) Hemingway, everybody's favorite punching bag, is a slight variation on the usual, roaring, chest-beating Papa Ernest caricature, which is more fun for actor Danny Wolohan than the audience. Despite their endless temporizing, and the fact that they have walked into this trap with their eyes wide open, Silverman sees her characters as victims. The Joris -- Helen relationship is a tangle of secrets, with each sneaking off to meet with their handlers (who, after all, might be the same person using different names). When the political winds shift in Russia and it appears that they are associated with the wrong side, both have much to fear. Silverman also catapults them into the future for the distressing revelation that artistic propaganda will give way to the much more effective practice of spreading disinformation on the Internet. These poor artists can never catch a break! Silverman is at her best when creating arguments that expose the characters in moments of honesty. Helen handily takes down Hemingway, exposing the power games practiced by men against women, leaving him temporarily speechless. Hemingway has an intriguing aria in which he compares art to neurosurgery: "You get inside somebody's brain, and you rifle around, and you change the connections, you change the neural pathways, and then you change them." But, structured largely as a series of feckless story conferences, Spain slows to a crawl. It's difficult to care about characters fussing over a project that none of them believes in; when the moment of disillusionment arrives, you want to say, what took you so long? Marin Ireland, an actress with a gift for making the progression of thought seem innately interesting, is especially compelling when, admitting the many falsehoods committed during filming, she insists, "We built a single beautiful sentence out of a muddy howl. And the way it felt -- to take all of that mess and turn it into... a kind of salvation..." She doesn't complete the sentence, possibly, in a tacit admission that, in the middle of a violent conflict that represents a dress rehearsal for world war, the problems of a few minor artists don't amount a hill of beans, as Humphrey Bogart notes in that wartime propaganda drama Casablanca If the usually fine director Tyne Rafaeli doesn't bring much urgency or momentum to the play's circular arguments, the fault surely lies in the script. And if Andrew Burnap's Joris comes off as a lightweight, that's the way the character is written. The production certainly has a look, thanks to Laffrey's ever-shifting, pitch-black set, which depends heavily on Jen Schriever's pinpoint lighting. Zachary James, cast as the mysterious Russian agent(s), ends the proceedings with a lovely opera aria, perhaps offering Silverman's belated affirmation of art for art's sake. But it's putting it mildly that the story of This Spanish Earth's creation, no matter how revised, isn't a suitable vessel for airing the playwright's concerns. There are many worse things than being an unfulfilled writer or filmmaker; a quick look at the newspaper will tell you that. --David Barbour 
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