Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

A couple of months back, Jodie Markell played actor-director Leni Riefenstahl in a piece called Leni’s Last Lament. I enjoyed Markell even as I had reservations about Gil Koffman’s script. Now we have Elizabeth McGovern playing actor Ava Gardner in Ava. Again, I enjoyed the performer while I had reservations about the script. The script McGovern is playing in is by McGovern.

There are ample reasons for a contemporary audience to continue to be fascinated by Riefenstahl. (Indeed, a new documentary about her has just been released.) Riefenstahl, aside from starting off as a gorgeous movie star, in the films she made for the Nazis in Germany, pioneered techniques that continue to be used in media today. She stays relevant.

I wonder, though, how many contemporary theatergoers have seen much of Ava Gardner’s work. She was a frequently arresting presence onscreen, and as she became more experienced, she grew into a performer who could hold her own with Richard Burton and Deborah Kerr in the film version of Tennessee Williams’s Night of the Iguana.

But McGovern isn’t particularly interested in Gardner as an actor. She’s mostly interested in Gardner as someone who lived by her own rules and slept with a fair number of interesting men, marrying three – Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra. I’m going to bet that only a minority of the people in the audience with me knew who Artie Shaw was. Given that a lot of younger people refuse to watch black-and-white movies, I doubt many of them are familiar with the films that justifiably made Rooney a megastar. Sinatra? OK, if you don’t know who Frank Sinatra was, you probably don’t go to the theater anyway.

McGovern the writer can’t make me care much about the particulars of Gardner’s marriages and affairs. Though I admired Gardner on screen, I couldn’t figure why, in contrast to Riefenstahl (who continues to be relevant in an appalling way), she should be of any special interest in a play in which she is portrayed by someone else. (This isn’t to say that a documentary with film clips of the real Gardner wouldn’t work.)

What kept me engaged with Ava was McGovern herself. We’ve grown used to her on Downton Abbey as the kind, supportive American wife of a British aristocrat. It’s a part that has demanded little of her. People who know her only from this would be unaware that she brought great wit and sass to her early film work. Playing Gardner, the wit and sass are present in abundance, as well as precise shifts between the young, vital Ava and the one who has been hobbled by health issues. In the program, there is mention of McGovern starring in a production of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Ava gives us a sense of what her Martha may have been like. So I enjoyed Ava mostly as a showcase of some underused aspects of McGovern’s range. For me, that was reason enough. It may not be for others.

The piece is based on a series of interviews Gardner gave to journalist Peter Evans in preparation for a book Gardner ultimately refused to publish. Evans is played by Aaron Costa Ganis, who has a strong stage presence that serves to give McGovern something substantial to bounce off of, and the fun the two have volleying quips back and forth is part of the pleasure of the evening.

I hope to see McGovern back onstage soon in something more substantial. I bet she has another, better play in her. And I think she’d be a swell Agnes in Albee’s A Delicate Balance.