Audience Guide Researched and Written by Tina Kakuske

From Real Life Farce to Stage

Moonlight and Magnolias is a comedy, and more specifically a farce. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines farce as “a light dramatic composition marked by broadly satirical comedy and improbable plot.” Playwright Ron Hutchinson recalled that, “The inspiration for ‘Moonlight’ came when I was visiting my father in England. I was reading Daily, Daily, the autobiography of Ben Hecht’s week rewriting Gone with the Wind, and literally from one footstep to another, it struck me, wow—this is classical farce.”

Moonlight and Magnolias – Based on Reality

Playwright Hutchinson was able to identify with Ben Hecht’s Gone With the Wind “imprisonment experience” since he also experienced being “in closed hotel rooms from Libya, to Morocco, to Mexico hammering out new scripts with ulcer ridden, catatonic producers ever present.” In Hutchinson’s own words, the play is about how Hollywood operated and continues to operate today while showing you how the magic gets made.

Dropping Names Like It’s Hot

The name dropping of Hollywood stars and star-adjacent people in Moonlight and Magnolias is a delightful and humorous plus. See how many names you recognize throughout the play. Here are a few to start – Hedda Hopper, Groucho Marx, George Cukor, Judy Garland, and many more!

1939: A Stellar Year in Hollywood

Moonlight and Magnolias takes place in 1939 and some of the best known and loved films from classic American cinema were released that year including Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Ninotchka, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Wuthering Heights, Stagecoach, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, to name a few.

1940 Academy Awards

The 1940 Academy Awards honored films from 1939. Gone With the Wind won eight awards including Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, and Best Screenplay. It also won two honorary awards for outstanding achievement in the use of color for the enhancement of dramatic mood, and a technical achievement award for pioneering in the use of coordinated equipment.

Screenwriters – A Dime a (Almost) Dozen?

Gone With the Wind had multiple screenwriters including Sidney Howard, Oliver Garrett, John van Druten, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles MacArthur, Winston Miller, John Balderston, Michael Foster, Edwin Justus Mayer, and Producer David O. Selznick himself before Ben Hecht was brought in as a script doctor. However, Sidney Howard was the only writer to win the Best Screenplay Oscar.

The Art of the Slap

The slap is a component of physical comedy or slapstick. The word slapstick came from the use of “a club-like object composed of two wooden slats” that produced a loud slapping sound effect. The slap is used in comedy “to create humor through exaggerated, safe, and absurd physical violence,” and the original slapstick device recreated a more obvious sound to go with the visual slap.

Found In the Play

Story Beats – Moments in a play that drive the plot forward, trigger emotional shifts, or mark major turning points. Sidney Howard’s GWTW script had most of the story beats already outlined by the time Ben Hecht worked on it.

Piffle – British slang for nonsense, rubbish, or trivial senseless talk. Fleming claims they are working with piffle, so they have to make everything BIG, ham it up, etc.

Suckered into buying this side of lox – Humorous exaggeration meaning that someone got completely taken advantage of. A comment from Selznick on the quality of the material they are forced to use for the script.

Plato’s Cave – An allegory where people live in ignorance and unquestioned belief, having only seen shadows of what they perceive to be real life. By “questioning assumptions, thinking critically and seeking abstract truths,” people can gain knowledge to understand the real world, but there will always be those who are content to remain comfortable with their unenlightened ignorance. Hecht compares Plato’s cave to the movie screen where people could be shown reality.

Did You Know?

• Director Victor Fleming was “the only director to have two films listed in the top 10 of the American Film Institute’s 1998 list of the 100 greatest American films, Gone with the Wind (1939) and The Wizard of Oz (1939).”

• Screenwriter Ben Hecht grew up in Racine, WI and won the first Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Underworld in 1927. He was uncredited for his script work on Gone with the Wind, by his request.

• Playwright Ron Hutchinson and Ben Hecht both have reputations as “script doctors.”

• Moonlight and Magnolias was nominated for the 2004 Joseph Jefferson Award for New Work.

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