Fans of Elizabeth McGovern who find their way to the Studebaker Theater merely out of a desire to see a star of the TV and movie franchise “Downton Abbey,” live and in person in Chicago, likely will find some surprises when they arrive on Michigan Avenue.
Shorn of lady’s maids, troublesome daughters, a menopausal Lord of the Manor and a country house that got more seductive cinematography than her, McGovern has the chance in the touring “Ava: The Secret Conversations” to really show off her long-standing stage-acting chops in the role of the Hollywood star Ava Gardner. Gardner, a country girl from North Carolina, became one of the most famous women in the world, with successive marriages to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra. That’s one high-maintenance trio, with the third being the scary motherlode of peak tabloid culture.
First and foremost, McGovern, who became famous herself at the age of 19 when she appeared in the movie “Ordinary People,” exhibits a formidable understanding of one of the great paradoxes of celebrity stardom, especially for an actress: that it makes it exceedingly difficult to have a happy life.
Gardner certainly was of that mind, observing to her sometimes ghostwriter Peter Evans, “When you get blown up so big, Peter, you end up paper-thin.”
Parse that quote and you realize that Gardner wasn’t just talking about the difficulty of surviving, let alone marrying, under constant scrutiny and public glare, which of course is a common theme of innumerable celebrity biographies, documentaries, jukebox musicals and the like. She was smart enough to see the dangers of perception being imbued by the object of that perception herself, of the star actually coming to match the trivialization and objectification she so despises.
McGovern achieves this in two fundamental ways.
Firstly, her Ava Gardner has the requisite scale of grandeur, emotion, glamor and palpable intelligence. That’s ideal for the historic Studebaker Theater, incidentally.
Secondly, this is a piece of theater that focuses on a life at one particular moment in time: it is based on conversations Gardner had with Evans in London between 1988 and 1990, when she was between 65 and 67 years old (she was dead within a year thereafter). And the fame and fortune of a star, even one who reached the heights of Gardner, is subject to the vicissitudes of time.
McGovern is younger than Gardner was at the time but is plenty old enough to understand the issues faced in Hollywood by star actresses of a certain age, and she has the guts to explore Gardner’s attempts to continue to use her sexuality as a persuasive tool. McGovern is, of course, famously beautiful so this does not come off as some sentimentalized act of pathos. Rather, it’s asking the question of what is a great star like Gardner, still inclined to lounge seductively on a chaise and answer questions wearing only a towel, really to do at such a juncture? And what does it mean?
I should note here that “Ava: The Secret Conversations” is ably written by McGovern herself (Moritz von Stuelpnagel directs) and the ever-fascinating question of who has the right to tell whose story is also in play. The second actor who appears in the show is Aaron Costa Ganis, who plays Evans, a high-end celebrity journalist who comes off here as struggling to actually focus on his subject, rather than on his own agendas. (He puts one in mind of Andrew Morton, the biographer of Princess Diana.) The very solid Ganis also plays “the husbands,” to quote Max in “Sunset Blvd.,” although all of that is rightly scaled so as not to draw too much attention away from the woman we all have come to see.
A good autobiography also has to be fresh, readable and deliver what fans want to read (especially in this case, since Gardner needed to make a buck). And the subject of said autobiography is poorly positioned to understand how to turn the quotidian into great literary themes; McGovern’s piece understands that too and, at least based on my reading of this situation, is more than fair to Evans, the man Gardner eventually fired, but who published the interview tapes anyway after Gardner’s death.
That ethically dubious decision perhaps was worth some stage time here, beyond the simplest of codas, but that really is one of very few caveats I have about this modestly scaled, 85-minute show, a minor one of which is that some of the content will seem familiar to those who have read Evans’ book and the biggest of which is the most obvious: you have to be interested in Ava Gardner. I certainly am.
Although, even as I type that, I wonder: Do you have to be?
Elizabeth McGovern channels Ava Gardner in ‘Ava: The Secret Conversations’
McGovern, whose choice to tour this show strikes me as personally courageous and something that Gardner herself would have adored, has an innate understanding of how her celebrity subject hardly was alone. Watch McGovern in the show and you can see Judy Garland at times, even as many others come to your mind. They haven’t always been played by one who seems to understand so well.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Ava: The Secret Conversations” (3.5 stars)
When: Through Oct 12
Where: Studebaker Theater in the Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes