The Terrifying Power of Art, in “Spain”

The play is a bit reminiscent of the great FX show “The Americans,” which, from 2013 to 2018, featured Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell as Soviet spies in America, posing as a wholesome suburban married couple, with two kids, a lush lawn, and a white picket fence. Those characters, however, were, at least outwardly, respectable members of the upper middle class, while Helen and Joris are nineteen-thirties bohemians, useful to the Russians because of their artistic talents and, we gather, their connections within urban creative circles.

This milieu is key to Silverman’s message. The play is, above all, about the sometimes terrifying power of art—how it can be used to change, by minute degrees, the minds and hearts of a social set, or a generational cohort, or, God forbid, an entire mass-media-hypnotized populace. As dismissive as some artists, even now, tend to be about the political implications and possible ramifications of their work, you can’t deny that the powers that ring the boundaries of acceptable discourse—governments and corporations, deeply rooted and venerable institutions—treat the divine play of art with deadly seriousness.

Take today’s atmospherics: a war breaks out and writers lose invitations to festivals and public talks, magazine editors get run out of town by nervous boards of directors, collectors dump painters, and on and on. Art matters, whether artists like that fact or not.

“Spain” opens a new vein of interest when two of Helen and Joris’s famous friends join them. In need of a screenwriter, they hatch a clunky plan to entice the novelist John Dos Passos (Erik Lochtefeld) to take the job—only to provoke the jealousy of Ernest Hemingway (Danny Wolohan), who they feel is actually a better fit. But Dos Passos turns out to complicate the mission much more than either “infiltrator” could have anticipated. In “Spain”—as he was in real life—Dos Passos is a friend of the writer and translator José Robles, who supported Spain’s left-wing Republican government but nonetheless was disappeared during that government’s brutal war with the Franco-led reactionary Nationalists.

Robles’s fate caused a rift between the real-life Dos Passos and Hemingway. The actual politics get mostly elided here, sometimes to the show’s detriment—in a different era, Silverman’s play, with its Russian baddies and exotic spies, might itself have been used as a neat piece of anti-Communist propaganda. But the specifics of Francoist terror, understandably, aren’t her subject. Art’s power is.

At one point, Hemingway delivers a monologue that encapsulates many of Silverman’s themes. He wants the audience to know about a time when somebody sang him a song:

She was humming so quietly and leaning so close, and even though the bar had been noisy, the background chaos began to drain away, and then—I don’t know how to say this—I could feel her. Like a tendril of something new slipping inside me. Like when you drink water that’s so cold you feel it wending its way down your throat and into your stomach. Like something that isn’t you, but now it is you.

Later, he concludes:

It’s like neuro-surgery. Isn’t it? Art-making, story-telling. 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. And maybe? You save their life. So this movie? That we’re all doing? It’s the equivalent of radical brain surgery.

It’s an unwieldy analogy, one that doesn’t quite scalpel its way into your brain. But you know what he means. One hopes that today’s artists—freighted with responsibility that they don’t always think to accept—do, too. ♦