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Spain is a play about a movie about a war. It tells the behind-the-scenes story of writing an antifascist propaganda film about the Spanish Civil War that was—and here’s the kicker—rumored to be funded by the KGB. While the play does center on a real documentary, 1937’s The Spanish Earth, playwright Jen Silverman hangs a disclaimer over the script: “This is not a history play.”
The note is for creative teams producing the play, Silverman tells WW.
“It felt important to communicate the lens through which I see it, which is contemporary/reckless/urgent, not as a period piece.”
Spain is based on events surrounding the Spanish Civil War: Various other countries got involved, including the Soviet Union, which was pulling the strings of the revolution, and hired U.S. artists such as Ernest Hemingway to produce propaganda that would get Americans to support its mission. But Spain is not meant to be a shot-for-shot depiction of what actually happened. We don’t know what actually happened anyway. Spies were involved. Silverman instead weaves together a combination of fact and dramatization. What if the KGB did commission the film? What then?
Spain premiered in New York in 2023, but this production by Portland’s Profile Theatre company, at Portland Center Stage starting Oct. 22, will be its West Coast premiere. Working with Tony-, Grammy- and Olivier-nominated composer Daniel Kluger, Silverman expanded its music significantly for this Portland run, adding live performances to this run featuring singers from Portland Opera, 45th Parallel Universe, and Metropolitan Youth Symphony.
“Delicious experiments,” the playwright has called them.
Hemingway figures prominently in the play. He’s one of the writers of The Spanish Earth. In Silverman’s version of history, Hemingway predictably, drunkenly blusters through his scenes, full of bombast about war and art. He presents a historical lodestone for those not intimately familiar with the other characters or particular events, a familiar voice who is both highly intelligent and massively obnoxious.
The other characters seem to be living in a noirlike thriller at times, complete with secret rendezvous and relationships that are never quite wholly defined. Joris, a Dutch filmmaker living in NYC, and his quasi-girlfriend, Helen, are tasked with making the film. But they struggle to find the right voice for the story, moving from novelist John Dos Passos to his far more famous colleague Hemingway, all while navigating the Soviet influence.
Profile Theatre’s artistic director, Josh Hecht, who is directing this production, tells WW that the aria toward the end of the play, its “emotional climax,” was designed as both a piece of propaganda and an art work capable of “revealing some of the characters’ inner lives to themselves.”
That tension is central to the play: the threshold between propaganda and art, and the question of what separates the two. “Can a false story be so good that it does something true?” Helen, one of the co-creators of the film, asks in the play. Leaning into the enticingly dangerous dynamic, Silverman describes wondering what it would take for art to leak through propaganda, “for falsity to create a portal of possibility that the truth might not have yielded.”
While the events of the play take place pre–World War II, the central questions are hugely relevant today. “Stories are more powerful than facts, unfortunately,” Silverman says. “I mean, America is currently reckoning with a tsunami of misinformation for a variety of reasons, but that’s one of them. People who are scared and angry respond with fervor to stories that make them feel like they can be safe, regardless of whether those stories are true.”
While one could go to Spain with the goal of being entertained by the inventive set design, soaring music and highly skilled performers, the play and this production in particular ask audiences to see beyond the spectacle and the historical story for those moments when fact might bleed through fiction.
SEE IT: Spain at Portland Center Stage, 128 NW 11th Ave., 503-242-0080, profiletheatre.org. 7:30 pm Thursday–Saturday and 2 pm Sunday, Oct. 22–25 and 28-31 and Nov. 1 and 4-8. $20–$50.
