Review: Ava Gardner Tells All in Ava: The Secret Conversations

In 1988, Ava Gardner invited British journalist Peter Evans to ghostwrite her autobiography. Though they got far in their process, Gardner eventually canceled the project upon learning of a successful libel suit ex-husband Frank Sinatra brought against Evans. The remnants of that project was eventually published in 2013 (posthumously for Evans, having died a year earlier) as Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations. Elizabeth McGovern has turned the biography into a play, Ava: The Secret Conversations, in which she plays Gardner. In some ways, her stage adaptation is as unconventional as Evans’s book.

Tellingly, the first person we see onstage isn’t Gardner but Evans (Aaron Costa Ganis). He interacts with the voice of his agent, Ed Victor (Chris Thorn), in a framing device that sets Ava up a memory play in which he recalls his experiences working with Gardner through late-night phone calls and profanity-laced in-person meetings. Like the book, McGovern’s play is as much about Evans as about Gardner. Though initially reluctant to take on the project, he eventually sees a classic American rags-to-riches story in Gardner rising from working-class North Carolina origins to Hollywood stardom.

His vision of the material, though, is compromised not only by his agent’s demands for something more salaciously gossipy, but by the insecure Gardner herself. Throughout, she exudes an unwillingness to delve into the darker corners of her life, preferring instead to talk more about her work: her star-making performance in The Killers (1946), her feuds with director John Ford on the set of Mogambo (1953), and her experience working with renowned British cinematographer Jack Cardiff on The Barefoot Contessa (1954). But Evans always guides her back into spilling tea on her three marriages, particularly her highly publicized relationship to Sinatra.

As both playwright and star, McGovern seems most interested in capturing a sense of Gardner reckoning with her life in her twilight years (she died in 1990). One behind-the-scenes anecdote in which she expresses disappointment that her actual singing voice was ultimately dumped in favor of a dubber’s in the 1951 screen adaptation of Show Boat suggests the depths to which she felt Hollywood stifled her creatively. And her emotionally abusive marriages appear to have led her to view all her subsequent relationships with suspicion, including this one with Evans, which she calls out as transactional on both their ends.

McGovern imbues Gardner with such life-force that one can see how she attracted so many people into her orbit, and this melancholic thread turns out to be the most affecting aspect of Ava: The Secret Conversations. Rather less interesting is the play’s meta-theatrical rumination on the challenges of turning a real person’s life into literature. Evans, through the conversations with Ed Victor strewn throughout the play, touches upon the various difficulties of a ghostwriter: finding the right place to begin, for instance, and wondering whether Gardner’s life is really interesting enough for a book. However intriguing Evans’s internal monologues may have been on the page, onstage they inevitably pale in comparison to the backstage stories Gardner recounts, something not even lighting designer Amith Chandrashaker’s overt spotlighting during these interstitial scenes can fully transcend.

McGovern’s cleverest conceit in her script lies in her having Evans also transition into Gardner’s three famous ex-husbands—Mickey Rooney and jazz musician Artie Shaw having tied the knot with her before Sinatra—in flashbacks, suggesting a writer who has dived too deeply into his subject. It also gives Ganis an opportunity to flex his own acting muscles, with him offering an especially impressive imitation of Sinatra’s singing voice. Shame that director Moritz von Stuelpnagel never quite figures out how to transition into those flashbacks more smoothly on David Meyer’s lavish drawing-room set. Instead, some odd details—such as props that are used in flashbacks yet remain in subsequent scenes—are enough to take us out of the action.

Dramaturgical nits aside, Ava: The Secret Conversations has been given a solid production under Stuelpnagel’s direction. Toni-Leslie James’s costumes for McGovern offer appropriately eye-catching Hollywood glamour. Alex Basco Koch’s projection design is most intriguing of all, with clips from Gardner’s films given the kind of pinkish tint that might befall an overused film print. His projections are also instrumental in an astonishing concluding stage effect in which Gardner appears to walk from the background of a stage right onto a movie screen in silhouette. We may not leave Ava knowing much more about the Hollywood icon than we did going in, but, as much as it may have pained her to realize it, for most of us the spell she cast onscreen is enough.