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Reviews: 'The Fifth Column' and more Off-Broadway'

BY LINDA WINER | linda.winer@newsday.com

March 28, 2008

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Ernest Hemingway: playwright? Jonathan Bank's Mint Theater Company, which makes major theater from little-known facts, has excavated "The Fifth Column" for what's probably its world premiere. (The Theater Guild produced a bastardized adaptation in 1940, but Hemingway refused to see it.)

The master tough-guy storyteller wrote this, his only full-length play, in 1937, while holed up in a Madrid hotel as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. Like "For Whom the Bell Tolls," his 1940 novel three years later, the play is an adventure story about an American fighting against Franco's fascists and struggling with duty and personal happiness.

"Fifth Column" plays as if it would have been better as a sweeping rough-and-tumble romantic movie. On the Mint's tiny (but always surprisingly mighty) stage, more than a dozen actors roll out almost three hours of heroics and flawed humanity with remarkable conviction and sense of style.

Kelly AuCoin has a fine-edged intelligence as Philip Rawlings, who pretends to be an alcoholic playboy while working in counterespionage for the Communist idealists. Heidi Armbruster brings a shimmering glamour-girl confidence as the American journalist from Vassar - a character based on Martha Gellhorn, who became Hemingway's third wife.

The woman wears clothes beautifully (expert costumes by Clint Ramos), but somehow manages to file stories by doing little more than preen and wait for men in her room in the bombed-out hotel. Philip actually lifts her in his arms and carries her to bed. Thanks to director Bank, we don't even think of laughing.

The Four of US. At Manhattan Theatre Club Stage II, 131 W. 55th St. Tickets, $50; 212-581-1212.

There are just two men in "The Four of Us," unless you count their egos. Benjamin (Gideon Banner) and David (Michael Esper) have been friends since camp. But Ben's first novel is an international smash, while David, a playwright, is struggling to get noticed.

This enjoyable and meticulously observed serious comedy veers into unfortunate self-referential territory toward the end, when playwright Itamar Moses complains about critical reaction to his own first big production, an ambitious but overreaching period piece called "Bach in Leipzig."

Until the meltdown, however, the 95-minute piece unfolds in emotionally revealing scenes. Pam MacKinnon's smart but simple production uses four backlit doors for flashy changes of time and place, while Banner and Esper explore the power shifts of winning and losing with startling sweetness.

The Drunken City. At Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St., through April20. Tickets, $45; 212-279-4200.

Arguably the very best dizzy-drunk special effects in low-budget theater history can be found in "The Drunken City," Adam Bock's weirdly endearing 80-minute exploration of expectations in the suburban subculture of the young and the desperate-to-wed.

Three 20-something women shriek and squirm in excitement over their engagement rings. The buddies - part of an extended tribe of like-minded girlfriends - get plastered during a bachelorette party in the late-night city. They meet temptation and a couple of guys. Their gay male friend comes to rescue them. Things change.

In some ways, this is a travelogue of a strong woman's nightmare, a world in which girls grow up dreaming only of weddings, after which life is supposed to begin. But Bock, an unpredictable new-theater force, twists cliche with fresh, quick tragicomic nuance, while director Trip Cullman and six physical-comedy experts find the pinball bounce and sad sweetness in incipient grown-ups who seem never to have left sixth grade. And whenever the ground shifts - literally - under their alcohol-wobbled feet, we feel the sensations of a joyride to despair.

The Fifth Column. At Mint Theater Company, 311 W. 43rd St., through May 18. Tickets, $45; 212-315-0231.