Love Goes to Press

Mint Theater, New York

(866) 811-4111

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“This play bears no resemblance whatever, of any kind at all, to war and war correspondents.” Those were the cautionary words of Martha Gellhorn, who along with fellow war reporter Virginia Cowles wrote this semiautobiographical, “tongue-in-cheek” take on the lives of two seasoned female correspondents in a World War II press camp, said Eric Uhlfelder in the Financial Times. Even today, it might strike some viewers as odd that a wartime story should focus more on romantic entanglements and professional rivalries than on actual combat. But this 1946 comedy was a work of escapism, “driven by the same impulse as Hollywood’s screwball response to the Depression.” If you accept those terms, “it’s easy to get swept up with the play’s charm.”

The play, here in its first revival, proves to be a “fascinating curio,” said Elisabeth Vincentelli in the New York Post. It has “quite a few zingers” and “very real comic potential.” But it’s hard not to notice that the plot isn’t “anywhere near as exciting” as the life stories of its creators. Gellhorn worked on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and Vietnam—and she had just divorced Ernest Hemingway when this play debuted. She included a Hemingway caricature here, a “posturing Yankee writer” who’s “a bit of a macho boob.” But amusing as that can be, the play never realizes its capacity for comic anarchy, a fault magnified by a production that’s “workman-like at best.”

Give Gellhorn and Cowles credit, said Rachel Saltz in The New York Times. They “didn’t write a great play,” but it delivers a satisfying mix of 1940s-era repartee, plus two female characters who seem well ahead of their time. It’s solid fun watching the authors’ surrogates, played by Angela Pierce and Heidi Armbruster, as they navigate their way around the male-dominated military camp and scheme to sneak away to the front line. “They’re like the little sisters of the fast-talking Warner Bros. dames of the 1930s: educated and all grown up and courageous enough to go off to war, notebooks at the ready and every hair in place.”