Noel Coward, who knew as much about theater as anyone in the first half of the 20th Century, once declared in notes to a friend that "novelists can't write plays and playwrights can't write novels." More than likely, he wasn't thinking specifically of Ernest Hemingway's only full-length play,
The Fifth Column, but he might as well have been. The three-act work, now getting its premiere at the Mint Theater, is a curiosity in many aspects -- but no way is it a successful drama.

In his eagerness to produce the revered author, Mint Theater artistic head and chief director Jonathan Bank assigned himself a daunting challenge, and he only begins to address the play's built-in problems. While h[...]