Critic At Large - "Moonlight and Magnolias" By George Kanzler Critic at Large Published: Friday, April 10, 2007 in The Beat Moonlight and Magnolias by Ron Hutchinson is a play about writing the screenplay to Gone with the Wind, but it hasn't been presented in Atlanta yet. And it's doubtful that it will be, or that it will ever be enshrined at the Margaret Mitchell museum on Peachtree Street. After all, that museum posits Gone with the Wind as a great American novel, hardly what the characters in this play - loosely based on reality - think of the novel. "How did you get suckered into buying this ball of lox?" asks screenwriter Ben Hecht, played by Tim Brosnan, of producer David O. Selznick (Allen Evans). And that's not the only disparaging words said about Mitchell's novel, which is also called "a piffle" and an overblown "bodice ripper." The reverence for Gone with the Wind on Peachtree Street is never evinced in this play, essentially a Hollywood behind-the-screen farce that can also be viewed as a gleeful deconstruction of Mitchell's novel. The play takes place in Selznick's office, where he's brought Hecht, Hollywood's most celebrated and prolific screenwriter/script doctor of the time (1938-39) to shape an acceptable, to Selznick, script of the novel, a task that half a dozen other writers have already failed to do. He's also taken director Victor Fleming (J. Michael Craig) off The Wizard of Oz set to join in the script writing process. Selznick virtually imprisons Hecht and Fleming ( who says "I'm locked in a room with two crazy Jews" at one point) in his office for a week, allowing them only peanuts and bananas (Selznick's idea of "brain food"), delivered by Miss Poppenghul (Glenda ManWaring), whose unraveling from super-efficient to flustered and flummoxed mirrors the farcical action of the play. Selznick has banked his career on making a blockbuster out of Mitchell's novel, its status as a super-bestseller spurring him on to heights of Hollywood idealist populism. He's one of those producers who sees the movies as the great populist entertainment and salvation of the time. His is a grand vision. Fleming's vision, meanwhile, is rooted in the techniques of cinema. He's always looking for the right angle, the right shot. To him, "the screenplay is a pimple on the ass of the production." Hecht is a realist, and more than a bit of a cynic about Hollywood. He's there for the money, but he's uncomfortable about the political and social implications of the novel, its "Moonlight and Magnolias" view of the ante-bellum South and largely benign take on slavery. Also, he hasn't read the novel. That last fact accounts for much of the play's hilarity, as Selznick and Fleming (who also hasn't read the novel) decide to act out the scenes for Hecht as he types them into the screenplay. You'll never look at the movie the same way (Try: There's a screening at 7 p.m. tomorrow, April 11, at Camelot Theatres, 48 E. Antrim Drive) again after you've seen Evans as Scarlett and Craig as Melanie giving birth. Evans, as both the most animated interpreter of the novel scenes, and as the megalomaniacal Hollywood producer, is this production's flamboyant star. He's got the best, funniest lines (he contributes the "Frankly, my dear" to the famous Rhett Butler quote) as well as the perfect blustery attitude. The play is best when it is most farcical and satiric. When Hecht is satirized for his liberal political-social bent (he's horrified that Scarlett slaps the slave girl Prissy, and wants to give her a civil rights speech after the slap) the play remains sharp and funny. But when he becomes self-pitying about being a persecuted Jew, the play becomes as flaccid as a deflating balloon. Pathos and farce just don't mix well. Nevertheless, Brosnan, like Craig, Evans and ManWaring, delivers a first-rate performance. And as in any farce, where split-second timing is essential, this cast works together as a seamless ensemble, as adept at physical humor and pratfalls as they are at inhabiting their onstage voices. It all makes Moonlight and Magnolias a thoroughly enjoyable, side-splitting performance and one of the best productions mounted on a Greenville stage this theater season.