I wrote the first draft of Spain in early 2021. Theater was shut down. Nearly all of the industries that not only employed me, but also gave me purpose and meaning and community, had been shut down. Our larger systems as well appeared to be crumbling: health care, the government. It was hard to get up and just keep doing the daily things I was doing in the face of what felt like an existential re-examination of our individual and collective values. Why do any of it at all? What did any of it mean?

For me, the answer became intrinsically tied to the conversations I was having – across time and space – with novels and plays and poems and movies and music. The ways in which people who had gone before me were speaking back to me, telling their stories in a moment in which I was desperate to hear them. Desperate to understand how other humans had watched the bedrock under their lives crumbling, and then re-assembled it all. Or, even more daringly, how they had jettisoned and rebuilt.


Spain is set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. In the 1930s, Stalinist Russia funded an American documentary film as an active piece of propaganda. It was helmed by Dutch-filmmaker Joris Ivens, who hired Ernest Hemingway as the ultra-American vox populi that would draw attention and therefore help direct American funds toward the Spanish Republican government (who, though it had labelled itself the “Democratically elected” government, was being operated like a puppet by the Russians.)


There is a version of this play that is about political chess-games. There is a version that is about how sometimes we don’t even know the masters for whom we work. (Hemingway did not seem to understand the context in which he was operating… or being operated.) Oddly, neither of these versions was the one that I attached to first. For me, Spain began as a play about how desperately we need to tell stories. Even when those stories are politically circumscribed, even when they get increasingly corrupted, even as they travel further from our control and therefore from our intention, the storytelling instinct itself is so necessary to our happiness.


Even if our imaginations are corrupted by the systems that have formed us. Even if we are desperately seeking and failing to dream outside what we know. Even if limitations have been imposed on us and we are acceding to them. Even then, I have come to believe there is a spell-casting, world-bending, generative capacity inside story-telling. We are changed by the stories we tell and the stories we consume. Sometimes we are changed by inches and sometimes by miles. And if it can only be inches… well, inches add up, over time.

-JEN SILVERMAN | PLAYWRIGHT