Theater Review: How ‘Gone With The Wind’ Was Birthed: ‘Moonlight And Magnolias’ At Chatham Drama Guild

It’s 1939.

You’re a journalist-turned-Hollywood-scriptwriter who has five days to write the screenplay of a mammoth book. Mammoth in the sense that it’s hundreds of pages long and that it’s a best-seller, and that its mammoth subject is the Civil War. 

No pressure here; the previous writer has been fired and his script torn to confetti. To achieve your goal, you are locked, rather unwillingly, into a room with the director and the producer (who happens to be the son-in-law of the Big Boss of the studio). You will be allowed nothing to eat but peanuts and bananas (because the producer believes that they’re brain food).

Oh, and you haven’t read the book, which is by Margaret Mitchell. How will it all turn out, both for the screenplay and for you?

This is the premise of “Moonlight and Magnolias,” a play by Ron Hutchinson on stage through Sept. 7 at the Chatham Drama Guild. And, yes, we’re talking about the screenplay for the motion picture called “Gone With the Wind.”

Briskly directed by Anna Marie Johansen, the play has a cast of just four: producer David O. Selznick (Andrew Haber); writer Ben Hecht (Matt Gardner); director Victor Fleming (Tim Moyniham); and Selznick’s secretary Miss Poppenghul (Kristen Winn and Pam Banas). They perform on a beautiful set designed and lit by Scott Hamilton. All of the actors have previously appeared in productions at the Guild and other local theaters, and their experience shows in polished, confident performances that allow them to share the spotlight as an ensemble. They’re especially good in scenes that require physicality — fights, slapstick, even portraying the sheer exhaustion of mental time travel to the Civil War South.

Johansen and the cast have a tall order to fill with Hutchinson’s script, which demands everything from the broadest of physical comedy to some serious confrontations about slavery, war, Jews and gentiles, the art of filmmaking, and, ultimately, about Hollywood’s mission on the eve of war. Should the movies in 1939 so recently grown up to be “talkies” portray America as it is, or America as it thinks of itself? We get to see that the answer is complicated.

It’s good solid stuff, well-written, well-directed and well-acted, and the pace never slackens as the crumpled peanut shells and papers pile up on the stage and the men’s clothes — and tempers — get just as crumpled. (Thank heavens it’s left to us to imagine what Selznick’s office must have smelled like!)

Miss Poppenghul (played at this performance by Winn) enters the torture chamber every so often, literally to bring a breath of fresh air, more peanuts and bananas, and a vision of a freshly-showered person impeccably dressed and well-rested. She also introduces a bit of comic suspense: how many different inflections can one character introduce to the line “Yes, Mr. Selznick?” (Answer: dozens!)

Because Hecht had not read the book, Selznick and Fleming decide to act out a synopsis for him, the result being that someone could enjoy this play even if they have only recently arrived from Mars and haven’t seen “Gone With the Wind.”

Central to the play is the movie’s birth scene, an episode where race and class and war and relations among women (and men) all collide, literally. There’s the high comedy of two men (Selznick and Fleming) trying to enact it for a third (Hecht), but that’s just some honey on a dense bread of American questions that not only remain unanswered, but that are more and more on the minds of our nation as symbols and values of the Confederacy re-emerge along with antisemitism.