Matthew Murphy
It is 1936, and Joris Ivens (Andrew Burnap) and Helen (Marin Ireland) are passionate filmmakers on the payroll of the KGB. The charismatic friends who maybe kind of a couple too want to make a stirring Spanish Civil War epic, but their paymasters want Communist propaganda. That is the set-up for the rambling and unsatisfying play, Spain (Tony Kiser Theater, to Dec. 17), in which—quite honestly—not that much happens, except Joris and Helen care about each other, jest, talk and test each other, worry about what they are involved in, and occasionally get menaced, or are menaced by shadowy figures.
The play slips jerkily between comedy and drama, and finds strange spaces to accommodate dramatic renderings of John Dos Passos (Erik Lochtefeld) and Ernest Hemingway (Danny Wolohan), as the characters mull the meaning of Spain, politically and culturally, and much else as they try to plan the movie. Zachary James plays the shadowy Karl, Joris’ handler, who also sings like a dream.
In real life, Joris Ivens—who was married to French writer and filmmaker Marceline Loridan-Ivens—directed The Spanish Earth (1937), an anti-fascist film shot in Spain, written by Dos Passos and Hemingway, and narrated by Orson Welles.