Martha Gellhorn was a bold, opinionated woman. Fearless, too: She worked as a war correspondent and married Ernest Hemingway. Then she dumped him.
Now, 14 years after her death, Gellhorn is enjoying a mini-revival. Alas, it’s not anywhere near as exciting as her life.
First out of the gate was HBO’s recent biopic “Hemingway & Gellhorn,” starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman in a tale as tepid as the marriage was tempestuous.
The Mint Theater doesn’t have HBO’s money, but a lack of stars hasn’t prevented the company from doing excellent stagings of little-known plays. But while Gellhorn’s romantic comedy “Love Goes to Press” — which ran for just five performances on Broadway in 1947 — certainly qualifies as obscure, you wish the show were wilder. After all, neither Gellhorn nor the play’s heroines got things done by playing nice.
Gellhorn and her co-writer, fellow frontline reporter Virginia Cowles, didn’t look far to create their leads: Like themselves, Jane Mason (Angela Pierce) and Annabelle Jones (Heidi Armbruster) are old friends and feisty “lady correspondents.”
“I’ll never forget when you turned up in Spain to battle for the underdog in that black Schiaparelli number,” Jane tells her pal.
“At that time, very few people knew how to dress for a war,” Annabelle replies.
The women have just run into each other at a press camp on the Italian front in 1944. It’s not long before they become entangled in romantic and professional rivalries with stuffy British Major Brooke-Jervaux (Bradford Cover) and a posturing Yankee writer named Joe Rogers (Rob Breckenridge).
The latter is obviously inspired by Hemingway, who wasn’t above stealing Gellhorn’s scoops. Here, Joe’s a bit of a macho boob.
“I’m going to get drunk,” he brags. “And then I’m going to write a good, long think piece.”
Gellhorn herself described “Love Goes to Press” as “a very minor piece of work.” She was too harsh: The play has quite a few zingers and very real comic potential in its pre-Pat Benatar description of love as a battlefield.
Sadly, the show isn’t as funny as it could be. The staging is workmanlike at best — it’s as if director Jerry Ruiz had never seen a classic screwball comedy in his life — and the actors lack zest.
As is, “Love Goes to War” is a fascinating curio, but more firepower would have helped.