Ava: The Secret Conversations

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American actress Elizabeth McGovern is best known today for her role as Lady Cora, Countess of Grantham, in the long-running Downton Abbey series. However, she is also an Academy Award-winning nominee for her performance in the film of Ragtime as chorus girl and actress Evelyn Nesbitt. Since the early 1990s when she moved to London, she has often appeared on the West End stage. Now she has come to our shores as Hollywood icon Ava Gardner in a play of her own devising: Ava: The Secret Conversations, adapted from the 2013 book of the same name by celebrity journalist Peter Evans and Gardner herself.

Although not the first name that comes to mind when one thinks of actresses to impersonate sex symbol Gardner, McGovern is charming and surprising, profane and coy, an independent woman who knows her own mind and has a great deal to say. She gives off flashes of fireworks along with the witty dialogue taken from Gardner’s own words. She is not only convincing but sympathetic as she recounts the mistakes and tragedies in her life. On stage throughout is Aaron Costa Ganis as British journalist Evans who we don’t learn as much about but makes an interesting foil for the flamboyant Gardner, even in these later years after her screen fame.

In 1988, Evans received a phone call from Gardner then living in London asking him to help ghostwrite her autobiography. Having not received a message from his agent to expect her call, he assumes that it is a hoax. Eventually she explains that she needs the money – she either has to write her memoirs or sell her jewels but “I’m kind of sentimental about the jewels.” Although Evans is working on a novel to be called Theodora, he accepts the assignment which gradually takes over his life with Gardner calling him at all hours of the day and night.

When he meets her in her elegant London apartment (setting by David Meyer), he discovers that her stroke has partially paralyzed her left side, but she is still extremely beautiful. While Peter’s agent Ed Thomas (voiced by John Tufts on the telephone) wants him to get the dirt on Gardner’s three famous husbands, as a writer he is more interested in where to begin this rags to Hollywood/kiss and tell autobiography, although he does get her to talk about her North Carolina farm childhood and how a photograph taken by her brother-in-law brought her to Hollywood.

Eventually, Gardner opens up about her three brief marriages and we learn the reasons that they failed. Married at 19 to child star Mickey Rooney who was then only 21, she quickly discovered that he was addicted to both sex and gambling. Married to 35-year-old musician Artie Shaw when she was 23, she found that he was so intellectual and superior that she could not keep up with him and they were divorced after a year of marriage. Evans does not get her to tell salacious stories about third husband Frank Sinatra but she does give an account of their tumultuous time together while her career was rising and his was in abeyance due to the unpopularity of his divorce from his first wife Nancy. She also speaks of her 20-year relationship with billionaire Howard Hughes who fascinated her with his mind but whom she did not see as husband material.

They speak of only a handful of her film roles as well as her most famous directors: her favorite film The Killers, The Barefoot Contessa and a role based on herself written by its director Joseph L. Mankiewicz who she believed hated her, Mogambo and its moody director John Ford who told her she was a real actress. She also speaks bitterly of the remake of Showboat in which she replaced her friend Lena Horne who she thought deserved the role. However, she is still angry that the studio would not let her do her own singing which she felt she could do successfully but she was ultimately dubbed as the producers intended all along.

While Ava: The Secret Conversations does not answer all of our questions, it does give us a convincing picture of the inside story of a Hollywood film star of the 1940s and 50s, a portrait of an independent woman who lived life on her own terms. McGovern may not look exactly like Gardner in her later years though she wears her hair in similar fashion (wig design by Matthew Armentrout) but is convincing as the Hollywood star who can curse like the best of them and is not shy about speaking her mind. Director Moritz Von Stuelpnagel who has directed with a silken touch has cleverly used film clips, home movies and newspaper headlines (projection design by Alex Basco Koch) to add authenticity to Gardner’s story. They are projected across the stage in pink and blue lights (lighting design by Amith Chandrashaker) that remind us that these are flashbacks.

Another clever touch is to have Ganis as Evans impersonate Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra in Gardner’s memories of them. Rooney greets her with lines from his recent film Strike up the Band. It is implied that Shaw’s lines come from his autobiography. Most striking of all is Evans as Sinatra singing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” in his Las Vegas debut so convincingly that we are never sure whether it is Evans himself singing or lip-syncing to Sinatra. Toni-Leslie James has clad McGovern in a beautiful wardrobe which in each of Gardner’s many scenes with Evans she appears in as another attractive outfit. London’s rain is convincingly portrayed by Cricket S. Myers’ sound design.

Ava: The Secret Conversations is both entertaining and informative. Ultimately we feel we have met Ava Gardner, a woman with many secrets who does not want to reveal them all. Elizabeth McGovern, herself a film and television star in the United States, has a quiet charisma and a glamorous demeanor. She is always captivating as she starts stories she doesn’t finish and then tells even better ones next.  Aaron Costa Ganis as Peter Evans is as conflicted as she as to his role in this autobiography, but is a fine foil for Gardner’s flashes of fireworks.  Not only is this an engrossing evening in the theater, based on a true story it is an illuminating insider account.

Ironically, Gardner broke off these conversations with Evans when she discovered that he had been sued by Frank Sinatra for libel, and then wrote her own autobiography with unnamed ghost writers but not published until eight months after her sudden death at 67. Peter Evans’s book was eventually published in 2013, a year after his own death at 78, based on the material used in the play.

Ava: The Secret Conversations (through September 13, 2025)

Stage I at New York City Center, 131 W. 55^th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.avagardnerplay.com

Running time: one hour and 30 minutes without an intermission