AVA: THE SECRET CONVERSATIONS - REVIEW OF 2025 PRODUCTION AT CAA THEATRE

Reviewed by James Karas

In 1986 English writer Peter Evans received a phone call from Ava Gardner – at 3:00 a.m., she invited him to ghostwrite her autobiography and told him she was seeking an Exit. In other words, she was looking to end her life.

Evans proceeded to have numerous telephone and in-person conversations with Gardner that he dutifully recorded. Their relationship cooled off and the book was not published during her lifetime. It was eventually published after his death and Elizabeth McGovern (of Downton Abby fame), has fashioned a splendid play based on it.

McGovern stars in this production with Aaron Costa Ganis as Evans and Michael Bakkensen as Ed Victor, Evans’ agent. McGovern has structured the play around three actors with Ganis taking roles from her life such as Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra. They were Gardner’s three husbands. Bakkensen is Victor’s voice when he talks with Evans.

It is a marvelous play that tells the dramatic, amusing and revelatory life of a great actress and a woman with a voracious appetite for sex. She was beautiful (Elizabeth Taylor was only pretty, she tells us) and every man dreamt of her as a sexual partner. She had a long friendship with Howard Hughes and there is no reason to believe that she did not have sex with him and, we suspect, many others. 

Aaron Costa Ganis and Elizabeth McGovern. Photo: Jeff Lorch

The play begins after Gardner has had a stroke and is living in a well-appointed apartment in London. Kudos to Scenic Designer David Meyer. When she tells the story of her marriage to Mickey Rooney, she emphasizes his sexual voracity and prowess which she obviously matched. At the time she was new to Hollywood and he was a star who begged her to marry him.

Her next husband was the jazz musician Artie Shaw and that marriage, like the one with Rooney, did not last long. She then married  Frank Sinantra, a domineering figure, who was connected to the Mafia. He was the love of her life, she tells us, and their friendship outlasted their marriage.

Aaron Costa Ganis takes on the roles of Gardner’s husbands seamlessly giving the play the needed variety and movement. The play uses salty language liberally and sexual references abound reflecting a central interest in her life.  Sinatra is described as one who comes in at 119 lbs. of which a hundred pounds is his weight and the rest is his penis.

Evans is an English journalist or writer who worked for the BBC. At the beginning he is nervous about meeting Gardner to the point of overacting, but he settles down and if you ignore his attempt at an English accent, he does a fine job. We concentrate on Gardner, in any event.

McGovern as Ava Gardner is superb. We hear Ava’s voice at different times in her life and she is commanding, high class, low class and in between with wonderful effects. McGovern gives a star performance like the woman she is representing.

 The production directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel uses projected clips that are mostly unhelpful, not to say awful. They are blurry or unclear and add nothing to the production. There are a few slides at the end that show us how beautiful Gardner was.  

At about 85 minutes, the show gives us an interesting portrait of a great star that is informative, thoroughly entertaining and worth seeing.
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AVA: The Secret Conversations by Elizabeth McGovern based on the book The Secret Conversations by Peter Evans and Ava Gardner continues until November 30, 2025, at the CAA Theatre, 651 Yonge St. Toronto, Ontario. www.mirvish.com/

James Karas is the Senior Editor, Culture, of The Greek Press, Toronto