Theatre in Review: AVA: The Secret Conversations (City Center Stage II)

	Aaron Costa Ganis, Elizabeth McGovern. Photo: Jeff Lorch

As an actress, Elizabeth McGovern has plenty going for her; as a playwright, she is much too generous. Really, she ought to hog the stage a little more.

Having cast herself as the legendary screen siren Ava Gardner, McGovern has made the laudable decision not to settle for another entry in the Dead Celebrity Playhouse genre, in which a famous person, sitting in his or her living room, tells the story of his or her life to the fourth wall. Instead, McGovern has written an honest-to-God play, filled with exposition, conflict, and a bit of a twist ending. Ironically, that's the problem with AVA: The Secret Conversations.

McGovern bases her script on a book by the British journalist Peter Evans, who, in 1988, was hired to ghostwrite Gardner's memoirs. As the script makes clear, the star is deeply ambivalent about revealing the details of her -- shall we say eventful -- life for the delectation of paying patrons. But, ill and short on cash, she has little recourse: "I gotta write a book or sell the jewels," she growls. "I'm kinda sentimental about the jewels." Steeling herself, she fixes her fiercest stare on Evans, whom she has summoned to her Knightsbridge digs, and says, "Dirk Bogarde said you could write a fucking book. Where do we begin?"

Alas for Evans, theirs is less a collaboration than a power struggle, with Ava alternating between coruscating bouts of candor and episodes of furious withholding. "How about this? Let's just make it up," she suggests at one point. Meanwhile, Evans is under pressure from his agent, who is under pressure from Simon and Schuster, to get the dirt on Gardner's relationships with Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and (the biggest prize of all) Frank Sinatra. Kitty Kelley's then-recent biography of Sinatra looms large over the proceedings, with Evans constantly being goaded to outdo her in salacious detail. Among her notorious tidbits: "Ava once said her husband was a 119-pound man, 19 pounds was cock!"

Which, I'm sorry to say, is about the level of wit you'll find at AVA: The Secret Conversations. (Another example: "She's had toy boys since before Cher had toys." Honestly, they used to do better in Photoplay and Modern Screen.) Despite the title, Evans keeps stealing focus, whining over the unfinished novel that no one cares about, spouting nonsense about the "North Carolina dust bowl" and trying to render Gardner's family as cousins to John Steinbeck's Joads, and generally making a pest of himself. Embarrassingly, he is forced to impersonate each of Gardner's husbands, although, admittedly, it's not his fault that, making like Mickey Rooney, he must announce, "You're fresh as a daisy and hotter than a hooker's doorknob on payday." (Evans is also harboring a secret that makes him manifestly unacceptable as Gardner's collaborator, and we spend most of the show waiting for that shoe to drop.) This is nothing against Aaron Costa Ganis, who works hard all night long, but one of the most fascinating women in Hollywood history is seated at stage center and we are constantly being asked to attend to the problems of a hack journalist. Even late in life -- shockingly, she is portrayed as a burnt-out case at 66 -- she has terrible taste in men.

As Gardner, McGovern prowls the stage -- one hand rendered useless by a stroke, the other clutching a cocktail for dear life -- searching for the package of cigarettes she hid from herself and handing out hanging judgments about her exes, former colleagues, and other apparent miscreants. Her eyes flash like opals while savagely dismissing Marlon Brando for peddling lies about her sexual performance. A minute later, she reclines on her sofa, playing footsie with Evans and purring like a kitten ready to pounce. Her mood shifts are sudden and unpredictable, and, after years of rough treatment, she is quick to accuse others of seeking to exploit her. Aside from an accent that wanders all over the map, McGovern is a sharp, intelligent actress, making of Gardner a convincing lioness in winter, even if she never conveys the powerful sensuality that made the actress second only to Marilyn Monroe. In truth, it's a little hard to accept her as a woman who raced into three tumultuous marriages and whose hell-raising ways impressed the likes of Ernest Hemingway. Still, considering the difficulty of tackling a character so iconic, McGovern makes a pretty good run at it.

But, because the script is so busy with other, more trivial matters, the portrait of Gardner that we get is little more to offer than a standard movie magazine summary. This is especially true of her marriages. Rooney, we learn, "taught me how to fuck." Next, up: "I was married to Artie Shaw quick as grass through a goose." As for Sinatra: "Frank lost everything because of me." For all its purported late-night intimacies, AVA: The Secret Conversations has nothing new or interesting to say about its subject.

The director, Moritz von Stuelpnagel, keeps the action brisk and efficient, and he has assembled a first-class design team. David Meyer's chintz-laden set is something to luxuriate in, aided by Amith Chandrashaker's sensitive lighting design and projection designer Alex Basco Koch's parade of period photos, headlines, and clips of The Barefoot Contessa and The Killers. McGovern models a drop-dead chic line of outfits, gotten up by Toni-Leslie James (aided by wig designer Matthew Armentrout). Cricket S. Myers' sound design includes such necessary effects as phone conversations and thunder. If this is a rather frail star vehicle, at least it comes with lush appointments. Overall, AVA: The Secret Conversations -- like the currently running Gene and Gilda (about Gene Wilder and Glida Radner) and last season's Kowalski (about Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando) -- provides another example of the perils of dramatizing such famous, larger-than-life personalities. In the above cases, the characters are flatly rendered; in this case, Gardner must fight to be heard.--David Barbour