The Story

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. They "sail in looking like Vogue illustrations" while scooping stories from their less adventurous male colleagues.

Annabelle and Jane, both glamorous American women, are autobiographical caricatures of the authors: Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles. Also caricatured in the play was Gellhorn's ex, another war correspondent by the name of Ernest Hemingway.

Both Gellhorn and Cowles were highly successful and serious war correspondents; they had met in Madrid while covering the Spanish Civil War.

Seasoned journalists but newbie playwrights, Cowles and Gellhorn wrote the play as a lark. "We knew nothing about the theater…we were barely playgoers." They did not know, for example, that playwrights were "expected to attend rehearsals and show interest and be helpful." They sat together in the balcony on opening night at London's Embassy Theatre in 1946, listening to the "audience roar with laughter" and then fled into the night when the crowd called "Author!, Author!"

Critical response was as enthusiastic as the roaring opening night audience—the Stage said "the humor rises to brilliance"—and it quickly transferred to the West End. The play was a resounding success—much to its authors' surprise. "The trouble was that audiences laughed too much and this convinced an American producer that he should take the play to New York," Gellhorn wrote 60 years later in her introduction for the belated publication of the play in 1995. "The play lasted four days in New York. We gathered the critics were furious with it…That was the end of the play."

Not quite…

In 1992, Professor Sandra Spanier wrote to Gellhorn suggesting that the play really ought to be in print. Gellhorn did not even own a copy of the play. Spanier sent her a photocopy of the only known manuscript, a "blurry carbon typescript on onionskin paper, on file at the U.S. Copyright Office." Gellhorn said the play made her "laugh out loud 3 times" and agreed to write an introduction.

In 2008 Mint did a reading of Love Goes to Press and the play had the audience roaring with laughter once again. Beginning May 26th, you'll have an opportunity to laugh too!

The Authors

Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) covered nearly every major conflict 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.

(Click image below to play video)

Lilya Wagner

• Sunday June 3, after the matinee
• 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.

MEET THE CAST

• Saturday June 9, after the matinee
• A talkback with the cast, director and dramaturg, highlighting the special preparation that goes into working on a fictional account based on real people. Also noteworthy, this play was first introduced to Mint audiences as a one-night reading in 2008 with many of the same cast members, all Mint "alumni". These actors will talk about what they remember from that reading, and to what extent that reading influenced the full production.

Sarah Blake

• Saturday June 16, after the matinee
• 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

Did you know?

Many of our EnrichMint Events have been recorded and are available for viewing online.