A First-Timer Makes Rhett and Scarlett Sing
By DONNA KORNHABER and DAVID KORNHABER
LONDON

MARGARET MARTIN is, to say the least, a highly unlikely choice to write the book, lyrics and music for a major West End musical version of “Gone With the Wind.” In 1998 Ms. Martin, who wrote songs in her spare time and had never had a play produced, began a quixotic project to adapt the Civil War epic to the stage. She went on to win permission from the estate of the author Margaret Mitchell to mount it and then persuaded none other than Trevor Nunn to direct the thing.

“I thought, this is a story that I can tell,” she said. “I just felt like I understood the characters.”

Her adaptation, which began previews on April 4, opens at the New London Theater here on April 22.

“Anything you can imagine, that’s what I’m feeling right now,” she said, looking out over the London streetscape from the offices of the show’s publicist. Ms. Martin, an American who lives in Los Angeles, would be the first to admit that her path to the West End has been extraordinary.

“I’d gone from a battered teenage mom at 17 to earning a doctorate at U.C.L.A.,” said Ms. Martin, 53. She got that doctorate, in public health, at 44, she said, “to embrace from a scholarly perspective the difficulties I personally lived.” When her marriage collapsed after the birth of her second child, Ms. Martin said, she was homeless with two children in Los Angeles for a year, sleeping on the floor of an office. “For me the feminization of poverty is not a theoretical construct,” she said.

She went on to become a maternal- and family-health specialist, working with Parenting magazine. She also founded, in 2001, the nonprofit Harmony Project in Los Angeles, which provides free music education to lower-income youth.

It was shortly after finishing her doctorate that Ms. Martin had the idea for the show. “I wrote songs for years, but I hadn’t published any,” she said. After completing what she described as “multivariable analysis with 900-line computer programs” for her dissertation, she realized that she needed a creative vent: “What came up was, write a musical!”

“Gone With the Wind” was a natural choice for her, she said. “No one else can tell it the way I can tell it because I’ve lived it, the kind of lived experiences that Margaret Mitchell was writing about.”

Ms. Martin was aware, however, of the strong possibility that the result would never be produced. “Middle-aged doctor of public health writes first play,” she recalled thinking. “No one’s going to give me the rights.” But after two years of work on the project, she tracked down representatives for the Stephen Mitchell Trust, which oversees the copyright for the novel, published in 1936, and presented them with the idea — book, lyrics, and CD demo in hand.

The trust was not without skepticism, said Paul H. Anderson Jr., an Atlanta lawyer who represents the estate. Agents in New York who advise the trust described the proposal as “a dead duck,” in Mr. Anderson’s words, given Ms. Martin’s lack of experience.

Still, Mr. Anderson said he and his colleagues thought Ms. Martin “had a tremendous idea there.” In particular they appreciated “her emphasis on aspects overlooked or diminished in the movie, aspects of family and the inherent worth of all people,” he said, referring to the 1939 Oscar-winning film adaptation starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. After her repeated entreaties, they agreed in 2002 to grant her the rights to make an adaptation for a period of two years.

Around the same time Ms. Martin came across an interview with Mr. Nunn in which he described a “personal passion for American history in general and the American Civil War in particular.”

So she sent him her materials.

Amazingly, he responded.

Mr. Nunn said he attempts to listen, at least in part, to all of the unsolicited musical materials he receives, subjecting them to what he calls “the Volvo test.”

“I have a place in the country, and these CDs are played on the journey between London and the country in the car,” he said. “The kids sit in the back and shout, ‘No, no, no, take it off, can’t we listen to the radio?’ ”

In all his years of the test, he said, Ms. Martin’s CD was the only one that passed.

“My daughter just chimed in with, ‘That’s a nice song. Can we hear it again?’ ” he said. ”My little boy in the back seat said, ‘Yes, I like it, too.’ I thought, that’s very, very interesting.”

Within two months Mr. Nunn was meeting with Ms. Martin in his offices at the National Theater, from which he was soon to retire as artistic director. “I was just struck by the sheer intelligence that was at work,” he said.

Known for his large-scale adaptations of classic works of literature, including “Les Misérables” and “Cats,” Mr. Nunn said he relished the chance to try his hand at “Gone With the Wind.” “There’s something thrillingly ambitious as well as preposterously ambitious, the undertaking of doing another music theater adaptation of a vast, epic novel,” he said.

Ms. Martin and Mr. Nunn collaborated intensely over the next few months. “Trevor really adapted what I brought to him,” Ms. Martin said. “We’d meet in New York or in London, and then I’d go back and have a lot of songs to write.”

After a workshop production in London in December 2004, plans were made for a West End premiere with what Ms. Martin described as “the heart and support of the Mitchell Trust.”

Asked whether the new adaptation might make it to the United States, Mr. Nunn demurred. “That isn’t the concern at the moment,” he said.

As for Ms. Martin, she is currently at work on two new plays.

“Most people stop themselves more than anything in the world stops them,” she said. “Imagination depends on the capacity to give yourself permission.”