Elizabeth McGovern throws herself into the role of Ava Gardner — but her Mirvish show feels exploitative

Are they merely going to be themselves — with all their characteristic quirks intact — and offer only a facile attempt at stepping into the role? Much of the audience probably wouldn’t care anyway. They’d relish the opportunity just to see their favourite celebrity up close and personal. 

Or is this star going to immerse themselves so fully in the part that they’re able to blur our sense of reality and suspend our disbelief — even among their most diehard fans? 

In the case of Elizabeth McGovern, it’s most certainly the latter. In “Ava: The Secret Conversations,” which opened Sunday at Mirvish’s CAA Theatre, the “Downton Abbey” actor throws herself so forcefully into the role of Ava Gardner, the Golden Age star of the silver screen, that she’s almost completely unrecognizable. 

When we first meet Gardner, in the twilight of her career, she’s dressed in a dull, grey tracksuit, with her legs curled up in an armchair and a cigarette in her hand. She stares forward with a cold, deathly gaze, her chin cocked ever so slightly upwards, as if to showcase her rosy-red lips.

Over the next 85 minutes, McGovern delivers an eviscerating performance as the temperamental Gardner — at times brittle and reserved, at other times spitting expletives toward anyone and anything in her vicinity.

If it isn’t already clear at this point, “Ava,” which McGovern also wrote, is a star vehicle. And when she’s behind the wheel, she’s like a race car driver dextrously navigating the hairpin turns of a Formula One course. But a race car “Ava” is not. It’s more of a backfiring scooter, aimlessly sputtering to and fro. 

The play is based on the 2013 book “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations,” by Gardner and the British journalist Peter Evans. It recounts the series of conversations between the pair in the 1980s, when the Hollywood star commissioned Evans to write her biography. In these interviews, Gardner discussed everything from her upbringing in North Carolina and her career on screen to her tabloid-worthy marriages and love affairs. 

But that biography never went to print. Shortly before her death in 1990, at the age of 67, Gardner pulled the plug on the entire project. It would take more than two decades before Evans received permission from Gardner’s estate to publish those interviews in what would become “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations.”  

Occasionally, it feels like McGovern’s theatrical adaptation wants, admirably, to critique the tabloid-ish nature of Evans’ tell-all, along with the exploitative world of Hollywood that Gardner was subject to — one that viewed her merely as the world’s “sexiest animal.”

“They took away my voice, Peter,” laments Gardner, in the play’s most powerful monologue. “The moment I set foot in that town. Eighteen years old.”

But McGovern’s show never truly gives Gardner back her voice. And at its worst, the play itself even feels somewhat exploitative of Gardner’s story, turning it into merely a vessel for McGovern’s performance. 

The key problem is that its central figure remains an enigma throughout. Who is this Ava Gardner, exactly? I’m not even sure McGovern knows. 

Like the book, or perhaps even to a greater extent, the play places Gardner in opposition to her ex-husbands and lovers: actor Mickey Rooney, musician Artie Shaw, the popular entertainer Frank Sinatra along with movie mogul Howard Hughes. If “Ava” defines Gardner at all, it’s only in relation to those men. 

McGovern structures her adaptation like a memory play. As Peter (Aaron Costa Ganis) questions his interview subject about her past relations, Gardner experiences flashbacks of those men, with Costa Ganis morphing into each of them. 

Director Moritz von Stuelpnagel stages these transitions with ease, with an assist from Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting and Alex Basco Koch’s projection designs, featuring archival videos and newspaper clippings. But McGovern’s narrative device quickly grows stale and predictable. Of course, we’re going to get an explosive flashback with Sinatra. Of course, he’s going to croon in it. (Costa Ganis does nail this impression, though.) 

The script’s pacing also wobbles throughout, especially in the scenes set in the ‘80s timeline, where it’s never clear how much time has passed between each of Evans and Gardner’s meetings. 

I’m sure many “Downton Abbey” fans will clamour for this opportunity to see McGovern on a Toronto stage. But though she no doubt delivers a memorable performance, it can’t quite save this hollow adaptation, which achieves little except to pile on to the Hollywood myth that is Ava Gardner. She was subject to enough during her time on this Earth. Can’t we now let her rest in peace?