Female journalists report from the front line on the Broadway stage

On the heels of the HBO movie, “Hemingway and Gellhorn,” starring Nicole Kidman as the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn comes the revival of the only play Gellhorn wrote. Written in 1946 with her fellow correspondent Virginia Cowles, “Love Goes To Press” deals with two wily female journalists who use their looks, brains and courage to cover stories at the front during World War II.

The play was well received in London in 1946 but only ran for four days on Broadway. The romantic comedy is set in a fictional Italian town in a press camp in 1944 with a group of journalists sitting around waiting for a news story. Suddenly, two women show up and everything changes. Although there are occasional sounds of explosions in the background, there is nothing somber or serious about the play. After all, it’s a romantic comedy and even the plots twists are predictable.

It’s easy to envision the two females protagonists as Gellhorn and Cowles themselves. Annabelle Jones (played by Heidi Armbruster) is a beautiful, idealistic writer who seems loosely based on Gellhorn. Like Gellhorn, who had a short passionate marriage to writer Ernest Hemingway, Jones divorced a fellow journalist who resented her success. Jones’ colleague, the feisty Jane Mason (Angela Pierce) quickly succumbs to the charms of a staid gruff English officer. Cowles, herself, married an English journalist who later became a politician.

The characters are straight out of 1940s movie; picture Rosalind Russell and Katherine Hepburn. Despite their drab brown and green uniforms, the characters wear red nail polish, lipstick and hair ribbons. Jones even wears red heels with her khakis. One wonders if this was a Mint Theater addition. Although the women constantly complain about how the men demean their abilities, they think nothing of using flirtatious ways to get what they want.

Mounted by The Mint Theater Company, whose mission is to produce “worthwhile plays from the past that have been lost or forgotten,” the play seems much too dated and long. The plot twists are obvious and the women are weak-kneed when it comes to love. The tough-talking Mason becomes totally passive, allowing her fiancé to boss her around and Jones instantly falls for Rogers, again, despite their history. Fortunately, both women regain their sense of identity at the end.

If you didn’t know Cowles and Gellhorn wrote the play, one might assume that two men did. But maybe the two women were doing what they did for all the years that made them successful journalists -- playing the game and doing it just a little better.

"Love Goes to Press" is playing at the Mint Theater Company in New York, New York. For more information, visit http://minttheater.org.