Jen Silverman’s SPAIN Launches Actors’ Theatre Grand Rapids’ 43rd Season

Actors’ Theatre Grand Rapids will open its 43rd season with the Michigan premiere of Jen Silverman’s Spain, running September 11–20 at Spectrum Theater on the campus of Grand Rapids Community College.

Set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, Spain reveals how propaganda, political power, and art become entangled in ways that feel hauntingly familiar today. Two New York filmmakers are swept into a state-sponsored propaganda machine, where the boundaries between artistic expression and manipulation collapse inside a noir-tinged world.

“Spain isn’t a regurgitation of headlines or a dramatized history lesson,” said director Jason Flannery. “It distills past and present into a theatrical language—something stranger, more lyrical, and ultimately more human. If you want to be an artist and make a living, whoever pays you has a hand on the wheel. The question is: how much can artists afford to vet their sponsors?”

At once witty, subversive, and deeply humane, Silverman’s play explores art as empathy, connection, fulfillment, and coercion. “We live in a world where artists are dismissed as ‘starving’ or ‘useless,’” Flannery added. “But if they’re so useless, why does society work so hard to silence or redirect them?”

For Actors’ Theatre, Spain is both a timely political provocation and a bold invitation to gather in the dark, to laugh, to question, and to remember that storytelling itself can be an act of resistance.

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