February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
It’s one of those yarns having to do with the wild antics behind the shooting of “Gone With the Wind” in 1939 that provides the jumping-off point for “Moonlight and Magnolias,” the knockabout farce that’s just arrived, packed with trivial joy, at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Stage I.
Make no mistake; what Hutchinson has achieved here is farce, pure and simple, and quite possibly the most enjoyable example of this slightly disreputable and seemingly half-forgotten genre since Michael Frayn’s great and gleeful “Noises Off.”
Where Frayn’s classic is a creature of enormous, even tricky complexity, Hutchinson’s hilarious play is a creature of utter simplicity, with three male characters quite literally trapped within a single office setting, start to finish, with a fourth, a female secretary, more or less crouching beyond the door and allowed only a few brief, but highly satisfying, sorties into the otherwise male precinct proper.
That Hutchinson has even attempted, let alone achieved, this particular play might come as a distinct shock to anyone familiar with “Rat in the Skull,” the searingly serious work for which he is best known, and which had a healthy run at the Public Theater a decade or so ago.
The male characters in “Moonlight and Magnolias” were, in their salad days, significant players in the Hollywood heyday in which they functioned.
David O. Selznick was, of course, the powerhouse Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer mogul who had purchased Margaret Mitchell’s epic Civil War-era bestseller and was attempting to turn it into a movie.
Ben Hecht was a famous Chicago newspaper journalist who, along with his writing partner, Charles MacArthur, had become a vastly successful Hollywood screenwriter.
Victor Fleming was a former limousine chauffeur who had somehow become an MGM contact director helming, when Hutchinson’s play begins, “The Wizard of Oz.”
The original director of “Gone With the Wind” had been George Cukor, a gay man who was celebrated for working with such female stars as Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo.
Clark Gable, cast as the saga’s hero, Rhett Butler, loathed Cukor and managed to get him replaced, ostensibly because he felt, rightly or wrongly, that he was concentrating on the film’s female stars, Olivia de Havilland, playing Melanie Wilkes, and particularly Vivien Leigh, the high-strung and little-known British actress who had won the part of Scarlett O’Hara, a role virtually every major Hollywood female had campaigned for and lost.
On Feb. 13, 1939, having fired Cukor, Selznick shut down production on “Gone With the Wind” and pulled Fleming off of “The Wizard of Oz.”
He then summoned Hecht, who was famous for working at great speed, and virtually imprisoned him, along with Fleming, in his office for a week, feeding them exclusively on peanuts and bananas, which Selznick believed would deliver vast supplies of creative energy.
The “peanuts and bananas” aspect of the tale has been disputed, but it adds to a good story, which Hutchinson’s play most definitely is. The title, “Moonlight and Magnolias,” is apparently a remark uttered by Hecht upon reading the first page of the book. There is some doubt as to whether or not he actually ever got beyond the first page.
The “Gone With the Wind” screenplay is credited to playwright Sidney Howard, but when Hecht arrived at Selznick’s office, he was confronted by a stack of scripts, written by some of the most admired writers of the era, the most famous being F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The story, as told by the nimble Hutchinson, has the three men talking and “acting” their way through the story, with Hecht banging away at an ancient Underwood until his fingers cramped up.
The idea of “peanuts and bananas,” by the way, provides designer Santo Loquasto with a series of splendid sight gags, good enough to render the theory’s veracity irrelevant.
Much of “Moonlight and Magnolias” is apparently based in truth, and the playwright admits to having drawn some of his material from Hecht’s autobiography, “A Child of the Century,” not to mention having consulted Gavin Lambert’s 1973 volume, “GWTW, the Making of ‘Gone With the Wind.'”
One of the secrets of making a farce work, a skill that has nearly disappeared in recent seasons, is to keep things moving so rapidly and so furiously that the audience is never given the chance to examine the venture’s shortcomings very carefully.
MTC’s artistic director, Lynne Meadow, and her cast of four absolutely fearless actors have done a splendid job of keeping “Moonlight and Magnolias” spinning like a top from start to finish, with shameless stunts and routines, including a slap sequence that even the Three Stooges might envy.
Matthew Arkin’s Ben Hecht is a vivid portrait of frustration and barely contained rage, while David Rasche scores as Fleming, a vague dim-witted Gentile who lucked out professionally, but not enough to make him entirely comfortable in the inherently Jewish Hollywood world.
Douglas Sills, remembered for soldering through the various incarnations of Frank Wildhorn’s lugubrious “musicalization”of “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” makes Selznick the unsteady rudder of Hutchinson’s no-holds-barred endeavor. Terrified of his tyrannical father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer, who is, he believes, determined to see him fail, Sills’s Selznick is the very model of a mogul whose fault lines are beginning to show.
As Miss Poppenghul, Selznick’s suffering secretary, Margo Skinner, even though her appearances are brief, is an unforgettable shipwreck of loyalty and strained patience, her silk stockings bagging by degrees with every entrance.
In one of those coincidences in which the theater sometimes abounds, there are two interlocking sets of once famous show biz titans brought to life on New York stages at the moment.
In addition to Selznick, Hecht and Fleming breathing anew on West 55th Street, Austin Pendleton’s darker comedy, “Orson’s Shadow,” recently opened on Barrow Street in the West Village, conjures up, not just the titular Welles, but also Laurence Olivier, critic and literary manager Kenneth Tynan, actresses Joan Plowright and Vivien Leigh, the last-named being, of course, the “glue” that links the two productions.
Audiences for “Moonlight and Magnolias” would be advised to take their seats early, since Meadow’s production projects a series of screen tests of actresses vying for the role of Scarlett. Among them are Katharine Hepburn, Lana Turner, Jean Arthur, Paulette Goddard, Joan Bennett, and Frances Dee, captured in footage that virtually defines the word “rare.”