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Jen Silverman is worried about art.
On the one end, as one ofSpains characters says, Art is a luxury.
Or worse, to quote another character, Art is dead.
On the other side of the seesaw: power.
Perhaps artor, at least, the practice of crafting fictionsis not dead at all but vividly potent.
says a third character.
You save their life.
You arenthavinga thought, yourereceivingthe thought that someone else crafted for you.
The novelists John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway helped put it together.
Thats all true and its just one pebble in the bucket.
Stalins Kremlin, through the global influence of theComintern, funded aboatloadof American culture.
and Somewhere Over the Rainbow), and Hemingway.
So why doesSpain, which handles such explosive material, often feel like its risking so little?
In part, its a textural thing.
Both Silvermans script and Tyne Rafaelis direction are slick and knowing.
Wegetthe language in the same way that wegetthe aesthetic.
Even when Silverman goes for sincerity, it feels like theyre holding something back.
They get more somber, more verbose, but not more exposed.
They writearoundthe cliff rather than leaping from it.
Marin Ireland plays Helen, Joriss collaborator, producer, and assigned girlfriend.
But somehow, despite Irelands great gift for raw intensity, we all stay pretty much intact.
She pushes, and the play pushes back.
(We know hes tortured because he tells us he is.)
And then she looked atme… Or are we just telling lies…?
Its craft without guts.
(And, by extension,amIall these things?)
Or is it themostpowerfultheonlything that matters, theonlything that lastsand possibly for all the wrong reasons?
The answer isnt satisfyingly dramatic.
Its something else entirely.
Its not only about power.
And its never actually aboutyou.
No one is going tothe Good Place.
For an artist, self-reproach and self-aggrandizement can be two faces of the same mirror.
Both are ultimately forms of self-protection.
Spainis at Second Stages Tony Kiser Theater through December 17.
