LOVE GOES TO PRESS is a wise-cracking romantic farce set in a makeshift press camp in the village of Poggibonsi, Italy, 1944. Headlining are two smart, sassy and determined journalists who brave the front lines to get their stories. Annabelle and Jane, both glamorous American women, are autobiographical caricatures of the authors: Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles.
Both Gellhorn and Cowles were highly successful and serious war correspondents; they met in Madrid while covering the Spanish Civil War. Seasoned journalists but newbie playwrights, Cowles and Gellhorn wrote the play as a lark. They sat together in the balcony on opening night at London’s Embassy Theatre in 1946 listening to the audience roar with laughter. The play was a resounding success—much to its authors’ surprise. Producers immediately brought the play to New York, where it lasted four days. As Gellhorn simply put it, “some jokes, like some white wines, do not travel.”
However, some jokes improve with age. Mint Theater’s acclaimed production of LOVE GOES TO PRESS had the audience roaring with laughter once more. “With its rat-a-tat rhythms, this Jerry Ruiz-directed production evokes the screwball comedies of the era”1 wrote the New York Times. “Mining 1940’s theater and film styles, LOVE GOES TO PRESS can feel satisfyingly old-fashioned. But it also has contemporary bite.”
Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) covered nearly every major confl ict during her lifetime, from the Spanish Civil War to the U.S. invasion of Panama (when she was 81). Famously, she was one of the few reporters who witnessed D-Day; she did so by locking herself in the toilet of a hospital ship – the first ship to survive the crossing. Gellhorn published 17 books during her six-decade career as a journalist, short story writer, and novelist.
Virginia Cowles (1910-1983) served as a war correspondent for the New York Times, the London Times, and the Daily Telegraph. During World War II, she interviewed Mussolini and Chamberlain and covered the German invasion of Poland. Cowles also wrote 15 books of non-fiction, including the 1941 bestseller Looking for Trouble.
By Maya Cantu
LILYA WAGNER
Lilya Wagner has a masters in Journalism and a doctorate in Education. She was one of the first scholars to gather information—including many valuable first-person interviews—about the women journalists who covered World War II—research which became the basis for her pioneering master’s thesis. This thesis, in turn, evolved into the groundbreaking book Women War Correspondents of World War II, published by Greenwood Press. A professional fundraiser as well as a scholar and writer, Wagner is a frequent workshop and seminar presenter and speaker. She is a faculty member at The Fund Raising School, which provides fundraising training internationally. She is also a member of the philanthropic studies faculty at Indiana University.
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SARAH BLAKE
Sarah Blake has a BA from Yale University and a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from New York University. Her novel, the New York Times’ bestseller The Postmistress (Amy Einhorn Books/Berkley Publishing), is set during World War II. Blake writes, “While researching my second novel, The Postmistress, I was casting about for real-life models for my character, Frankie Bard, a war correspondent, and the owner of the English bookshop in Rome thrust Gellhorn’s The Face of War in my hands. It was one of those marvelous serendipities that often happen in novel-writing. Martha Gellhorn’s story–how a bold and winning woman with guts and great talent talked her way onto the fronts of most of the wars of the 20th century, wanting to be in the middle of the biggest stories of her time–as well as her words, their great passion and sorrow, helped me frame a fiction that is as much a tribute to her and to many of the other women like her, as it is a consideration of war reporting, and of war itself.”
Sarah Blake’s article for the Telegraph on Women War Correspondents of WWII
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