The Maddening Truth (review)

In an unusual scheduling, The Maddening Truth, a play about Martha Gellhorn by David Hay, recently opened one block away from the new production of Ernest Hemingway's The Fifth Column. Less a drama than an attempt to probe the complexity of the beautiful and gifted Gellhorn, The Maddening Truth succeeds, as Wilborn Hampton noted in the New York Times, "as a character study . . . its weakness as a play is the paucity of dramatic conflict." Actually, the audience seemed caught up in the drama of Gellhorn's life, although only a few of the many men she knew were represented on-stage—notably Laurance Rockefeller and of course, Ernest Hemingway.

The play moves back and forth in time with dramatized sequences, beginning in 1972 with Gellhorn's attempt to secure an interview in post-war Vietnam, and then going back to 1940 when she and Hemingway were caught up in the Spanish Civil War. The play then takes us to Dachau, and movingly conveys her effort to write about the horrors she witnessed there. Gellhorn's struggles with her writing are at the center of her own conflicts, worsened by Hemingway's denigration of her work. As the play moves into 1973, Hemingway's ghost appears, suggesting that Gellhorn never really came to terms with the tensions reflected in their almost constant fighting. In 1975, we see her adopted son and the focus on her writing that was more important to Gellhorn than her personal relationships and eventually led to her estrangement from him. From the opening of the first scene, when a bbc reporter is seeking to interview her, to the play's conclusion, as Gellhorn is giving that interview and reading from her own work, Travels With Myself and Another, we observe a woman tormented by her desire to write a great novel, trying to witness all of the battles of World War ii and the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, and at the same time, seeking a personal life that can compete with her ambitions. Lisa Emery's performance is so dynamic, that the focus in each of the dramatic encounters with the men in Gellhorn's life is always on her—as it should be in a play that seeks to establish her importance as a writer, war correspondent, and woman.

Although the playwright dramatizes Gellhorn's relationships with the men in her life, these scenes and the dialogue between Gellhorn and each of her loves lack richness and intensity. The major exception is Gellhorn's encounter with Hemingway's ghost. Terry Layman captures Hemingway's enigmatic personality, gives depth to his hostility, and even in their most hostile moments, reveals his underlying love for Gellhorn. Each of the other actors is excellent, notably Richard Bekins as Laurance Rockefeller, in whom many of the men in Gellhorn's life are embodied. For the audience, the problem is that aside from the very brief scene with Hemingway, the play does not probe the relationships between Martha Gellhorn and her other loves. But the acting, even in the minor roles, is uniformly excellent.

Despite the lack of dramatic conflict, The Maddening Truth is a richly layered portrait of a beautiful, complex, and brilliant woman. Indeed, although it is only 100 minutes long., the play suggests that Martha Gellhorn's career is among the most fascinating of the period from the late 1930s through the 1970s. At the intermission and the conclusion, members of the audience were eagerly scrutinizing the latest Gellhorn biography—and many were in fact purchasing it. Lisa Emery's performance, perfect in every way, reflects Gellhorn's complexity and intensity, as well as her beauty. I believe that in The Maddening Truth, Martha Gellhorn finally escapes the fate that plagued her throughout her life—her celebrity status a Hemingway wife.