Local playwright looks to bring life of Mary Walsh Hemingway to stage

Hemingway was a marvelous writer with many personal demons to overcome.

Mary Welsh Hemingway, of course. She was an author, journalist, war correspondent, world traveller, and her most haunting demon would be husband Ernest who was famously difficult to be around and in the end committed suicide by shotgun, leaving Mary to find him after the blast shook throughout their Idaho home in 1961.

One could say Ernest did some writing as well. His death shook literary culture.

Mary wrote all about it in her autobiography How It Was, published in 1973, a dozen years after her husband’s death. Even in her own story, she was a secondary character to Ernest.

That seemed the lot of anyone to whom he was associated.

It made Prince George writer/publisher Virginia O’Dine angry. She has put Mary’s story to the pen with more fervor than perhaps anyone ever has. The drama of Mary Welsh Hemingway was enough to ignite an entire play. The first public reading of The Fourth Wife takes place Thursday at Artspace.

“Ninety-nine per cent of it is based on truth. I played with the timelines a bit but the material is all true,” O’Dine said.

What writer hasn’t heard of Ernest Hemingway? What writer hasn’t inhaled at least one of his masterpiece novels?

Obviously O’Dine knew of this literary lion, but it was a book about the famed Hotel Ritz that turned her wheels towards this new original play. Ernest stayed at the Paris landmark.

A suite there is named after him, as is one of the bars.

O’Dine picked up the book in a hurry at a vintage bookstore in North Vancouver as she passed the time through her daughter’s medical appointments.

Her daughter is Canadian Olympic snowboarder Meryeta O’Dine, who has sustained some injuries in her career, and like Ernest could overshadow those around her, just by volume of publicity.

Her mother’s capabilities with words and language, however, take a back seat to no one, and so O’Dine was sensitive to all the references in first the Ritz book and then more as she examined about how Ernest had four wives and all of them seemed shunted either by him or by history to the sidelines.

“Did you know that Mary Welsh Hemingway was the first woman to ever get a story on the cover of Time magazine?” O’Dine said. “She was a highly respected writer, a highly respected journalist, it’s no wonder Ernest fell for her, but after that it all became about him. It happened to his first three wives, too. In those times, once you married someone, you just became ‘the wife’ so that influenced my title. I think The Fourth Wife says a lot.”

There are very few characters in O’Dine’s play. Other than Mary Welsh Hemingway, there is Valerie, Ernest’s long serving secretary; Ernest’s estranged son Gregory who ended up meeting Valerie at Ernest’s funeral and went on to marry; the family’s Cuban housekeeper Rene; and Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

It is a tight cluster, all set in the Hemingway’s villa in Cuba, a place to which they retreated after the sensational funeral in the United States.

“I was intrigued by the stories of the people in his life who were essential to him, his own life, but got such a small place in his life story,” O’Dine said. “The harder I dug, the madder I got because it wasn’t there. It was really hard to find the highlights of their lives because he was so much in the picture, taking all their space. The hard part was not writing them into this storyline, the hard part was finding the source material about who they really were.”

The reading of the script is an exercise in developing the play. In the same way that a standup comedian typically needs to run new jokes past a live audience before confidently adding it to their set, a playwright is never able to perfectly ascertain the effects of a new script until a crowd sits it through.

She knows this from past projects, most notably her hit stage adaptation of the Robert J. Sawyer novel Rollback.

The full premiere of The Fourth Wife is still about a year away, O’Dine estimated, but this first public interaction was essential to reaching that final draft.

“Community theatre involves the community,” she said. “A writer is just guessing until there’s an audience involved.”

The characters in this reading will be portrayed by Catherine Higgins, Mike Maguire, Jody Newham and Frank Peebles. Production details are being arranged by Pocket Theatre.

Admission is by donation of cash or food, all for local charity.

Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Artspace (upstairs at Books & Company) with the performance getting underway at 7 p.m.

The dialogue contains some mature language and subject matter.