Emboldened by their success in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Nationalist ideologues sought to revitalize the stagnant Spanish theater and promote values associated with the newly formed authoritarian regime. The memory and restaging of seventeenth-century comedias became a crucial part of this project that focused particularly on Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna, a history play that dramatizes a village's fifteenthcentury rebellion against a tyrannical overlord. The definitive performance of Fuente Ovejuna during the early years of Franco's dictatorship, a production directed by Cayetano Luca de Tena at the Teatro Español in 1944, represented the culmination of the right's struggle to regenerate the theater. By adopting a fascist aesthetic and reinforcing the regime's political legitimacy through history, Luca de Tena's production captured its contemporary moment and signaled a possible solution to the theatrical crisis, one that blended historiography, aesthetics, and politics.