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The Fifth Column: A Play by Ernest Hemingway.

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The Fifth Column: A Play by Ernest Hemingway. Directed by Jonathan Bank. The Mint Theater. 311 West 43rd Street, New York, NY. 26 March through 18 May 2008.

The Fifth Column is generally regarded (when it is regarded at all) to be something of an anomaly in the Hemingway canon. The author's only full-length play, and one which has garnered little critical or commercial attention, it is, as John Raeburn diplomatically puts it, a work "not integral to [Hemingway's] literary reputation" (5). The Mint Theater in New York City, whose mission is to bring "new vitality to worthy but neglected plays," has recently given life to characters who, until now, have lain quietly between the covers of the 1938 The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories ("About"). The Mint Theater production, under the direction of Jonathan Bank, is also the first time Hemingway's play has ever been professionally produced according to its original script, so, in a sense, it is both a revival and a first run.

The play concerns the activities of counter-espionage agent Philip Rawlings, a hard-drinking man's man and Communist party operative posing as a war correspondent. He works out of the Florida hotel, tracking down members of the "fifth column" Fascist sympathizers working from within against Loyalist-defended Madrid. The other journalists in Philip's hotel, Dorothy Bridges and Robert Preston, think Philip is a "playboy" and a brawler,...