Theatre in Review: Love Goes to Press (Mint Theatre Company)

	Heidi Armbruster (top) and Angela Pierce. Photo: Richard Termine

"They run this lousy war on sex appeal!" So says one of the beleaguered males left blindsided by the heroines of Love Goes to Press. Obeying the write-what-you-know rule, Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles, who risked life and limb to cover many of the key events and personalities of World War II, penned this screwball comedy about a pair of reporters who resemble, well, Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles. Named Jane and Annabelle, they're a pair of bullet-chasing lady journalists who, makeup cases in hand, hop the nearest plane or staff car, gleefully insert themselves into war zones -- and the hell with the dangers. They run rings around their ink-stained colleagues and military press officers alike, breaking the rules to get as much truth past the military censors as the traffic will bear. And, when the day's work is done, if an attractive man is available -- well, a lady needs a friend, doesn't she?

It's February 1944; Jane and Annabelle both turn up in Poggibonsi, Italy, eight miles from the front. Jane has a scheme to get herself inserted, via ambulance, into a band of US soldiers holding onto a mountain while surrounded by Germans. Annabelle has found a handsome air force pilot willing to sneak her into Poland, which has been declared off limits and is, therefore, irresistible to her. Both plans have been hatched behind the back of the press officer who wants them booted out of camp immediately, if not sooner. Further complicating matters is the appearance of Joe Rogers, Annabelle's ex-husband and journalistic rival, who has a touch of larceny in his heart when it comes to filching Annabelle's scoops. Even more inconvenient is the appearance of Joe's fiancée, Daphne, a titanically self-adoring actress who sees World War II as one big personal appearance tour -- as long as she doesn't have to get too close to the front. Meanwhile, bombs fall, planes take off, and armies are joined in battle just around the corner. (In Jane Shaw's excellent sound design, the explosions are creeping ever nearer.)

Gellhorn and Cowles claimed to be total theatrical neophytes -- an assertion contradicted by their play's solid construction -- and they swore they wrote Love Goes to Press just for fun. London audiences got the joke and made it a hit; it dive-bombed on Broadway, lasting a mere five performances in early 1947. Today, it's hard to say why this fast, funny, totally irreverent tale rubbed critics the wrong way. The production notes supplied by the Mint suggest that it was too soon after the war for American audiences to find laughter in the subject -- although such blockbuster military comedies as Mister Roberts and The Teahouse of the August Moon weren't far behind. One has to wonder if the play's caustic attitude toward the second-oldest profession -- many of the play's reporters, lacking solid information, simply make their stories up -- or if its heroines' unrepentant dedication to their work and disregard for men and marriage was simply too much for postwar audiences. In one respect, the play was an act of sweet revenge; six years after Ernest Hemingway's The Fifth Column portrayed Gellhorn -- then his wife -- as a madcap socialite swanning through the Spanish Civil War clad in mink and clutching a champagne bottle, Love Goes to Press offered up Joe Rogers, a lazy, lecherous Hemingway-esque blowhard with a gift for plagiarism. (They were divorced by then, because Gellhorn had behaved too much like Annabelle, preferring the clash of armies to a life of a hausfrau and lover; if they hadn't split, this play would have surely sealed the deal.)

In any case, 1947's loss is our gain, especially in Jerry Ruiz's production, which has the true Howard Hawks spirit -- with lines delivered at the speed of typewriter keys turning out a front-page story. Ruiz skillfully orchestrates a scene of wildly overlapping dialogue, and he extracts the schmaltz from a love scene, playing it out against the sounds of a nearby battle. ("If we could only stay like this always, with no one to bother us," the man of the pair croons, while plaster from the last explosion rains down on his head.)

Ruiz has assembled a cast that understands that fast-and-furious underplaying is the key to this kind of comedy. Angela Pierce has plenty of swagger as Jane -- and, given a corker of a speech denouncing the behavior of men, she works up a fine fury; she's equally amusing when, later, in a state of infatuation, she struggles to convince herself that she's ready for life in the English countryside, hunting, fishing, and sitting in a duck blind at 4 am. Heidi Armbruster -- who played the Gellhorn character in the Mint's production of The Fifth Column -- is on holiday here as Annabelle, cracking wise, chasing handsome airmen, and getting her own personal general on the phone to make strictly illegal arrangements, even as she struggles to keep Joe out of her hair and her headlines. (Surveying Joe's latest conquest, the simpering Daphne, she mutters, "Do you suppose he loves her mind, or is it her soul?") Daphne is in the very capable hands of Margot White, trilling her lines in a Billie Burke soprano and delightedly regarding everyone she meets as a potential fan club member. "Sometimes I have to pinch myself, the times that we're living in," she says, tweaking her cheeks to get her face nice and rosy for the men in the room. (Full disclosure: White is a good friend of the PLASA office.) There's also tiptop work from Bradford Cover, as the major who wants to whisk Jane off to a life of pastoral pursuits; David Graham Jones, as a British reporter who mistakenly tries to pass off Daphne as "the bravest British star of the century;" Jay Patterson and Curzon Dobell, as a two-man Greek chorus of newspaper hacks; and Ned Noyes, as an English corporal with modern views on marriage. ("I think it should be cheerful, at least at the beginning.")

It all plays out on Steven C. Kemp's set, which plausibly conjures up the first floor of an Italian farmhouse commandeered by the Allied forces; Kemp also manages a lightning-fast transition to a second location, the upstairs closet where Annabelle and Jane are forced to bunk under primitive conditions. Andrea Varga's costumes -- barring a slightly dubious pair of red high heels for Annabelle -- feel true to the period. (Love that mink for Daphne!)

Christian DeAngelis' lighting is thoroughly solid. "Oh, Jane, isn't it lovely to be in the same war again," asks Annabelle, and indeed it is --for them and for us. Once again, the Mint has rescued a perfectly enjoyable play from the scrap heap of history. How do they do it?--David Barbour