Matt Austin, Steve Yudelson and Paulette Layton are all veteran performers in Brookfield and Ridgefield, but I think they were better here than I have ever seen them, which is definitely a tribute  to director Tim Sheehan.

Theater Review—

‘Moonlight And Magnolias’ And The Behind-The-Scenes Making

Of A Blockbuster Movie, Now At Brookfield Theatre For The Arts

By Julie Stern

BROOKFIELD — The making  of the movie  version of Gone With the Wind, based on Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 blockbuster novel,  was a momentous chapter in  Hollywood history  that has been the subject of at least several plays. Tea at Five, Matthew Lombardo’s devoted  portrait of Katharine Hepburn,  shows the star in her prime, waiting confidently for the invitation from producer David O. Selznick to play Scarlett — an invitation that never comes — allowing the actress who plays Hepburn to run a gamut of emotion from pride and arrogance to humiliation to bitter defiance.

On a quite different note, Ron Hutchinson’s slapstick comedy Moonlight and Magnolias, the current production in Brookfield, focuses on Selznick’s impulsive decision to toss the script, and fire his director and script writer, a week before filming is set to start. Dissatisfied with what he has seen, Selznick hires a new director (Victor Fleming) and a new writer (the newsman and liberal social commentator Ben Hecht). Locking them in his office, Selznick gives them five days to come up with a new script. Until then they will not be allowed to sleep, leave the room (except to use the bathroom), or eat anything except what Selznick considers “brainfood:” peanuts and bananas.

Unfortunately, Hecht admits he has never read the book, and has no idea what it is about.  This doesn’t faze Selznick: while Hecht pounds away at a manual typewriter,  he (Selznick) and Fleming will act the story out for him.  All he has to do is put it into dramatic form. Start your Underwood…

I had not seen this show before and didn’t find it all that funny, but at the Brookfield Theater for the Arts, director Tom Sheehan has made it really snappy and fast moving, getting the most out of his four actors, who use body language and gesture to create a hilarious procession of slapstick buffoonery.

Tim Phillips, as the portly, blithely confident Selznick, and Steve Yudelson, as the suave, cynical Fleming, take turns flouncing and mincing about the office as  they re-enact a crazed condensation of the most memorable scenes, while Matt Austin, as the brash newspaperman Hecht, cringes in disbelief, as well as increasing hunger and exhaustion. All three of them are very, very funny in how they play their roles.

So is Paulette Layton as Selznick’s secretary, Miss Poppenguhl, in what is essentially a running joke as the five days take their toll on her efficiency and willingness to please.

In addition to the ongoing sight gags, there are two threads of irony that repeat throughout the play. The first is the fact that Fleming and Hecht are absolutely convinced that this movie will be a flop — that films about the Civil War never attract audiences, and that Scarlett’s selfish character and the lack of a “happy” ending will doom it to oblivion.

Selznick’s anxieties about his own father’s failures, and his tense relationship with his father-in-law — whose money he needs to finance the picture — are motivating him to aim for something huge. But in this office, at least, he is surrounded by doubters, who have no idea of what the audience knows, that Gone With The Wind will be one of the greatest hits of all times.

On a more profound level is Hecht’s unhappiness with the underlying message of the script he is being told to write. To his horror, as he watches the story unfold, he sees it as a tribute to the old South — an apology for slavery, and racism, and the vigilantism of the Ku Klux Klan. At a time when Hitler’s shadow is threatening Europe and the rest of the world, how can he and Selznick, as Jews, create a movie that is basically an endorsement of the same kind of racist policies that Hitler preaches?

This is a serious question, but it doesn’t mesh well with the play’s overall manic comedy. The audience is not going to really think this through.  When Hecht tries to put anti-racist rhetoric into the speeches of the black characters, Selznick makes him take it out. We’re making a movie, here, he tells Hecht. Our purpose is to entertain, not make people think.

And that’s what the play does. It was funny, and entertaining, and definitely worth the price of admission.

The people around me were all laughing, and so was I. Austin, Yudelson and Layton are all veteran performers in Brookfield and at the Ridgefield Theatre Barn, but I think they were better here than I have ever seen them, which is definitely a tribute to director Sheehan.

(Performances continue weekends until May 12. See the Enjoy Calendar, in print and online, for details.)