Ava: The Secret Conversations, which opened tonight at New York City Center, is the stage equivalent of those old-time Hollywood biopics we get at the movies come every awards season. It’s a star turn in a play about a star eternally alive on Turner Classic Movies, which hits the familiar beats of highs and lows. The difference here is that the star, Elizabeth McGovern, has also written the show, which has hit the road for a three-city tour after debuting in L.A. two years ago. Clearly the life and times of Ava Gardner, the glamorous lead of The Killers, Showboat, and The Barefoot Contessa, marital survivor of Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra, and crush object of Howard Hughes, struck a chord.
Other than their both being London expatriates, far from Hollywood in later life, Gardner and McGovern don’t have much in common. (Ragtime‘s scandalous Evelyn Nesbit aside McGovern was more the Ordinary People girl next door in supporting parts in her prime, and never a boldface name stalked by paparazzi like Gardner.) The sisterhood under the skin is hard to discern in the play, an unfocused if sometimes entertaining one-act blend of fact and fiction that needs some explaining. In 1988, her career over and her life nearly ended by a stroke, Gardner, short on funds to pay the mortgage on her London digs, shopped around for a ghost writer for her autobiography, settling on Daily Express journalist Peter Evans. Before her death in 1990 Gardner did complete Ava: My Story–with the assistance of others, as her relationship with Evans had soured. In 2013, a year after his death, Ava: The Secret Conversations, drawn from his transcripts and recollections of their time together, was published.
I haven’t read Evans’ book but in the interim between My Story and his story Lee Server’s rollicking Gardner biography, “Love is Nothing,” appeared. If McGovern had simply pulled up a chair and dished out anecdotes from any of these accounts you’d be spellbound, when not rocking with laughter at the Technicolor absurdity that Server captures so well. But McGovern has instead imagined the backstory, with Aaron Costa Ganis as Evans, who is sucked into her capricious orbit. Their doomed partnership almost capsizes at the beginning, with Gardner suggesting that the book lead with funny stories of her post-stroke (the bawdy beauty had no vanity) and Evans arguing that it start at the start, with her poor (“but not dirt-poor!”) upbringing in rural North Carolina. Evans wins that round and the project, overseen by the unseen literary agent Ed Victor (Chris Thorn) who’s angling for Kitty Kelley-type dirt on Sinatra, her third and last husband, proceeds in fits and starts. Gardner frets that she’s cursing too much (then continues to do so) and drops the too-occasional story, with memories of Lena Horne, Omar Sharif, and Mike Nichols (she read for The Graduate). The show then shades into fact-and-fiction fantasy segments conjured by the lonely, illness-addled star, with Ganis playing the manic Rooney, the priggish Shaw, and the fiery Sinatra. While no good for each as hard-drinking newsmakers she and Sinatra remained lifelong friends, and (spoiler?) Gardner chose that friendship over the book, as the volatile Chairman of the Board had once sued Evans and the BBC for libel and was unhappy to hear of their collaboration. And so a celluloid goddess of unearthly beauty passed into legend, as a flurry of footage accompanies her exit into the firmament.
McGovern, wisely, doesn’t “do” Gardner, an impossible task that thwarted Kate Beckinsale in the Hughes biopic The Aviator. Her own years in London and on Downton Abbey have given her the same semi-aristocratic mien of her subject, and she looks enough of the part in Toni-Leslie James’ costumes and Matthew Armentrout’s hair and wig design. But she’s given too much of her own show to Ganis, who deftly plays the difficult men in Gardner’s life, when what we expect to see is more of the performer’s life in full. There’s not nearly enough, for example, on her great friend Rene Jordan, a Black neighbor from her childhood who was obliged to act as her maid in Hollywood and New York so as not to unsettle whites who couldn’t comprehend their relationship, or her involvement with the NAACP. (This may all be a play in itself.) Through the haze of her intentions I can see that McGovern wanted to rescue Gardner from the tabloid hell of her marriages, but dramatizing them center stage undercuts the goal.
Ava is the story she’s chosen to tell from Gardner’s, and Moritz von Stuelpnagel’s direction and David Meyer’s scenic design shift ably from the real to the reel. If only there were more to The Secret Conversations than just men.
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