Theater Review: ‘Ava: The Secret Conversations’

Geffen Playhouse currently has a run of Ava: The Secret Conversations starring Elizabeth McGovern and it’s absolutely worth the visit to see it.

Ava: The Secret Conversations runs from runs April 13 – May 7. The play was written by Elizabeth McGovern and is directed by Moritz Von Stuelpnagel. If you don’t already know Elizabeth McGovern (Once Upon a Time in America, Downton Abbey) stars as Ava Gardner. She has impressive career and is an Academy Award, Golden Globe and Emmy Award-nominated actor who might very well be an EGOT in the not too distant future. Her performance as Ava is singualr, she wrote a fantastic piece for herself in this re-telling of Ava’s later years as she recounts her heyday in Hollywood. In a once forgotten biography, in Ava: The Secret Conversations this play shines as a look at what could have been and what once was. Her biographer comes to write about her marriages, the famous men in her life. Instead what unfolds is a dramatic and intimate look of Ava’s life in her later years away from the limelight of Hollywood living in London. She shares her struggles after her stroke and whats left after fame has gone. With peaks into her marriages, some shocking some predictable, it’s a lesson that life is a journey not a destination.

As the play came to an end and the lights came up shining a light on Ava and her bipgrapher Peter’s photographs and dates of life and death a young GenZ student who had been sat behind us exclaimed: They were real!” We felt our soul leave out body, but at the very least theater is reminding a younger generation of the great performers and creators who have come before.

Tickets currently priced at $30.00 – $129.00. Available by phone at 310.208.2028 or online at www.geffenplayhouse.org. Fees may apply. Currently, children under six years of age will not be admitted. Masks are no longer required–but are encouraged–for audiences in our theaters and lobby/courtyard areas for all future productions.