Moonlight and Magnolias may not break any new ground, but the American Stage production is so sharp in every aspect, you can't help but have fun from first moment to last. Ron Hutchinson's literate comedy about the making of the movie Gone With the Wind is acted to perfection by Bryan Barter, Matthew McGee, Christopher Swan and Susan O'Gara, staged eloquently by Drew Fracher and designed beautifully by costumer Frank Chavez and scenic maven Lea Umberger.
The show is charming and funny, and though it tends toward farce, it also includes, however briefly, two or three themes of real significance. I saw a production of Moonlight several years ago in Sarasota, but the American Stage offering leaves that version in the dust. If you're interested in seeing top theater artists at their best, make time for this winner.
The premise of the play is that production of GWTW has been suspended by producer David O. Selznick because of his unhappiness with the film's script and with George Cukor's directing. So Selznick brings rewrite expert Ben Hecht together with director Victor Fleming — who's been working on The Wizard of Oz — and demands that they come up with a top-notch screenplay in five days. The conditions are these: No one leaves Selznick's office till the new screenplay is completed; no calls will come in or go out. Selznick and Fleming will act out Margaret Mitchell's novel while Hecht works at his typewriter, and they will eat nothing but bananas and peanuts till they've succeeded.
Now get to work — and forget that no civil war movie has ever made a penny.
What follows gets sillier and sillier as it goes on. For one thing, there's the personality clash. As played by Christopher Swan — in one of his best performances ever — Fleming is proud, insecure, competitive and a big baby. What he really wants is for someone to tell him that his film Test Pilot was a masterpiece. Instead he has to put up with Matthew McGee's Ben Hecht, a curmudgeonly, sarcastic, dyspeptic soul who isn't impressed by Fleming, Selznick or himself.
And ordering them both around is Bryan Barter's Selznick, a combination of benevolent dictator, desperate businessman, verbally abused son-in-law (he's married to Louis B. Mayer's daughter) and capitalist philosopher. Watching Selznick and Fleming pretend to be characters in GWTW is mildly funny at first but eventually becomes hilarious, and watching all three (and Selznick's secretary, O'Gara) physically and mentally break down after endless hours of work is about as delightful as comedy gets.
Near the end, all three men are down to their T-shirts, physically and mentally disheveled, wading through a floor full of peanut shells and discarded manuscript pages, and referring piously to a copy of Mitchell's novel that looks like it's been attacked by starving rats. How shall Scarlett O'Hara slap Prissy when they're both trying to help Melanie give birth?
All the pent-up rage the men have been feeling comes out in a slap-a-thon right out of a Marx Brothers movie. What's Melanie feeling at the moment of childbirth? Fleming thrashes around on a couch, thrusting his pelvis into the air as he strives for parturition.
But author Hutchinson also has a few serious notes to consider as his farce progresses. One of them concerns the status of the Jewish Selznick — and Hecht — in a Hollywood that Hecht believes still to be anti-Semitic. Though Selznick denies it, Hecht suggests that the producer's efforts to make an American War and Peace are really aimed at effecting his acceptance by gentile society.
Another theme is the presence of racism in Margaret Mitchell's novel. Politically liberal Hecht is stubbornly conscious of the fact that the heroes of GWTW are unrepentant slave-owners and that they even take part in a Klan raid late in the story. Hecht wants to alter these parts of the film so that American can see "its ugly face in the mirror." But neither of the other men is deeply concerned about the subject, and a particularly sensitive moment is solved by a camera angle.
Finally, Hutchinson spends a few moments on the question of power in the film industry: who has it, producer, director or writer? The conclusion that Selznick reaches — that careers are built or destroyed on the whim of unpredictable ticket-buyers — is hard to counter. Maybe the movie business is a democracy after all.
"In the Beginning was the Deal," says David O. Selznick, but in Moonlight and Magnolias, it's personalities that matter most, personalities and the demands of a fickle, brutal public. As Selznick, Hecht and Fleming try to build a winning script, chaos erupts — and so does intelligent comedy.
This article appears in Jan 30 – Feb 5, 2008.