‘Spain’ Off Broadway Review: A Movie Classic Gets a Makeover

Jen Silverman reimagines the story behind the making of “The Spanish Earth”

Marin Ireland in Spain
Marin Ireland in "Spain" (Credit: Matthew Murphy)

Has any major writer taken a bigger hit over the decades than Ernest Hemingway?

He is the buffoon in Jen Silverman’s play “Spain,” which had its world premiere Thursday at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theatre. Although “The Spanish Earth,” which Hemingway wrote with John Dos Passos, is never mentioned during the course of Silverman’s 90-minute one-act play, that 1937 anti-fascist film is the elephant – or is it a bull? — in the room of an apartment shared by the film’s director, Joris Ivens, with his partner, Helen, in “the West Village, 1936.”

Even before “Spain” begins, that setting of “the West Village, 1936” in the Playbill credits may be a bit head-shaking.

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