Although I’d read or heard nothing about Ava: The Secret Conversations in 2023 at the Geffen Playhouse—that’s Los Angeles, of course—I still had some idea of what I’d encounter when I showed up at Manhattan’s City Center production. The title is taken from the biography/memoir by Peter Evans, who could be described as a British celebrity journalist, published in 2013 with Gardner claimed as coauthor. That told me something.
Since I also was aware that Elizabeth McGovern, best known as Downton Abbey’s Cora Crawley, would be appearing as the title figure, I assumed that because she has more than a passing resemblance to the renowned Hollywood star, she’d decided, as the Ava: The Secret Conversations playwright, to give herself a stage romp.
She’d frame herself playing a figure recognized not only for her beauty and acting abilities but also for her much-publicized smoking, drinking, and cursing and marriages to, in this order, Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra. Oh, yes, Ava: The Secret Conversations bursts with obscenities.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★☆☆ here.]
As a Gardner fan, I was steeped in her heavy reputation as gossip-column fodder. I knew—what Gardner fan didn’t?—that, having grown up on a rural North Carolina farm, she had been eyed, at 18, by an MGM talent scout in a photo and shipped off to Hollywood. This despite her never having acted and never believing she’d be much of an actress. More than that, I knew she didn’t care. I’d read Ava: My Story, her 1990 no-holds-barred autobiography.
So in I strode, expecting to see two facing chairs, one occupied by McGovern as Ava and one occupied by Aaron Costa Ganis as Evans, interviewing her as if for his prospective book. I expected a lively conversation during which Evans would elicit unedited racy comments from the famously outspoken Gardner, all of them destined to be inserted verbatim into the eventual moneymaking volume.
But how wrong I was! Yes, I did have a belated warning when I glanced over the program, where it specified that Ava: The Secret Conversations is “written by” McGovern. Shouldn’t that, I asked myself, be “adapted from”? Hadn’t she adapted the Evans book?
She hadn’t. An adaptation isn’t what she’d had in mind at all—when Amith Chandrashaker’s lights come up, a projection features an aviso that goes something like this: “Everything you’re about to see is true. Except when it isn’t.” (Eventually, the whole enterprise expands into an Alex Basco Koch projection extravaganza. Why wouldn’t it, with multitudinous Gardner glamour stills handy?)
What Gardner had in mind and what’s now on City Center view is a two-hander—well, three, as Gardner’s agent Ed Victor is sporadically heard from—about the tussle between an uncertain subject and an egotistic biographer: She needs the cash, and he isn’t convinced he should put aside Theadora, the novel he’s eager to finish (though is earning an $800,000 advance).
To be more exact, McGovern has unleashed twin character studies, the Evans study no less significant than the Gardner. She’s focused on what happens when egos and intentions collide over the creation of a book, the main aim being what Evans’ Simon & Schuster editors are pressing from him: lowdown on the Rooney, Shaw, and Sinatra marriages, plus page-tickling skinny on Gardner’s extended affair with eccentric aviator/film director billionaire Howard Hughes. All of them, by the way, were abusive men, examples of what’s currently termed toxic masculinity.
McGovern supplies it and more: On the handsome David Meyer set representing the London home Gardner lived in the last years of her ill-marked life, charged moments from her 67 years are revisited as high theatrics.
During several sequences, Evans becomes Rooney and Sinatra. Sorry to say, the accumulating incidents, as conceived by McGovern and directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, become more and more and more ludicrous. At one point, Sinatra, drunk, clambers outside a window to swear at pedestrians.
At another, Evans as Sinatra delivers Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” not in bad voice and only moments before Gardner’s entire enterprise is called to a halt as she, without explanation, abruptly decides she wants no book and, through agent Victor, informs Evans he’s no longer needed.
Oddly, with Gardner becoming the volatile out-of-work actress and Evans as a man attempting to restore her dignity, Ava: The Secret Conversations begins to resemble Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth. Perhaps McGovern might have been better off appearing as Alexandra Del Lago/Princess Kosmonopolis in a revival of the baroque drama.
It certainly can be said that she looks fine here in the many outfits Toni-Leslie James has designed for her. When first seen, she’s barefoot, Gardner often announcing she was habitually barefoot in Grabtown, N.C. She admitted she agreed to film The Barefoot Contessa solely for that onscreen opportunity.
What Gardner is shorn of in McGovern’s piece are too many of the quotes that might have come up in a straightforward interview. That’s way too unfortunate. Here for the record is only one lively remark: “I do owe Mickey one thing: he taught me how much I enjoyed sex.”
One last mention to alleviate any lingering concerns about Evans: He published Theodora in 1994.
Ava: The Secret Conversations opened Aug. 7, 2025, at City Center Stage 1 and runs through Sept. 14. Tickets and information: avagardnerplay.com
