Don’t expect to gain any deep insight into the life and loves of Ava Gardner from Elizabeth McGovern’s “Ava: The Secret Conversations.” McGovern, who probably is best known as Lady Cora in “Downton Abbey,” gives a creditable performance as the legendary star from the Golden Age of Hollywood, but her Ava is a rather predictable diva.
The basic problem is the source material. McGovern’s play is based on a series of interviews Gardner did with British journalist Peter Evans, starting in 1988 when she called from her London apartment and asked him to ghostwrite her autobiography. She was recovering from a stroke and needed the money. However, she pulled the plug on the project shortly before her death at 67 in 1990 because, it has been said, she was worried her third husband, Frank Sinatra — with whom she was still friendly after their 1957 divorce — would object. Decades later, with permission from Gardner’s estate, the book was published in 2013, not long after Evans died.
Evans’ account is more about him than about Gardner and, judging by the way McGovern has dramatized it, he’s neither a nice person nor a very good writer. She’s also given the actor who plays Evans—Aaron Costa Ganis—a heavy burden. Besides engaging in a developing relationship with Gardner, he portrays all the men throughout her life, including her three husbands—Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Sinatra—and Howard Hughes, with whom she had an affair. This occasionally becomes confusing, as the time shifts from present to past and back again, and his roles do, too.
Just getting started is an issue for Evans, especially given the interference of his agent, Ed Victor (Michael Bakkensen), who is mainly an offstage voice. Evans is reluctant to take the assignment because he sees himself as a novelist but, once he learns about Gardner’s impoverished childhood in North Carolina, he envisions himself as the John Steinbeck of celebrity ghostwriters comparing her life to that of the Joads in “The Grapes of Wrath.”
Meanwhile, Victor keeps urging Evans to get Gardner to spill the beans on her famous husbands. He thinks juicy gossip about them is more likely to sell the book than anything about her, because her star is fading. Yet he also warns his client to keep from falling for her, saying “she’ll eat you alive…She’s had toy boys since before Cher had toys.”
Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, the play spends relatively little of its 85 minutes on Gardner’s short marriages, and Ganis’ appearances as the husbands are augmented by Alex Basco Koch’s projections splashed across the back wall of her London apartment designed by David Meyer. We don’t learn much, really, except that Rooney initiated her into the joys of sex, and Shaw wanted her to improve her intellect. Her relationship with Sinatra remains pretty vague, but I had the sense that all three were abusive in one way or another.
McGovern has the difficult task of showing all different sides of this woman and sex symbol at all different stages in her life. She’s best, I think, at being a young coquette and an entitled older woman with a taste for salty language.
Gardner and Evans’ tumultuous and ever-changing relationship doesn’t come across as well as it could. There’s little chemistry between them, and not that much seems to be at stake when she calls the project off. I must admit, though, that may be because I found him to be such an unpleasant character.
“Ava: The Secret Conversations” was first performed in London in January 2022; it had its U.S. premiere at L.A.’s Geffen Playhouse in April 2023. It ran in New York before coming to Chicago. Next, it’s off to Toronto.
McGovern deserves all the credit in the world for undertaking such an ambitious project. Maybe she’ll be able to whip the script into shape and make the show more exciting. I’d also love it to include more about Gardner’s films.
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