AVA: The Secret Conversations – 04 September 2025

AVA: The Secret Conversations numbers among the most engaging two-handers I have ever seen. This is due in large part to the absolutely mind boggling versatility of actor Aaron Costa Ganis, credited with the role of Peter Evans but also playing Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra. Ganis slipped in and out of roles and accents with a deft ease that was absolutely amazing and completely believable. His foil, Elizabeth McGovern played one wildly inconsistent character—Ava Gardner—whose mental health challenges coupled with the dramatic aftermath of a stroke made her unpredictable. While Ganis was challenged with playing multiple roles as the show went through memories, McGovern was challenged with keeping some consistent elements in one role despite the intense changes her character was going through between scenes. Both were very successful, and ultimately brought back to life former celebrities whose influences linger despite their names being said less and less frequently.

One of the fundamental conflicts that emerged in the play centered around whose story the world wanted to feel—Peter felt that he was writing Ava’s story, while his manager, Ed Victor (voiced by John Tufts) felt that the juicy details of Frank Sinatra’s juicy bits were what everyone wanted to hear. The choice to keep Ed offstage at first seemed like a cop out to eliminate an actor, but as the show progressed, it proved an expression of the outside world being incredibly detached from the space Ava and Peter were cultivating between them—a space that excluded the pressure and judgment of the outside world. These spaces are rare, and, sadly, time limited. Ava and Peter’s relationship fell apart when Ava discovered that Peter had buried a connection to Sinatra. After all the time she had spent talking about wanting to know the details of Peter’s personal life, the second she found something upsetting, she slammed the door in his face, never to reopen it. Though she had spent the whole story painting herself the victim, this ending begs the question: how many others genuinely wanted to make things right? Is slamming the door a habit of hers that protected her or isolated her? Did the bright and bold Ava Gardner spend a lot of her life living in fear?

The design elements, particularly scenic (David Meyer), lighting (Amith Chandrashaker), and projection (Alex Basco Koch), wove us in and out of the rich tapestry of Peter’s research, his conversations with Ava, and his struggle with the outside world of deadlines, money, and desire for scandal. One place we never really got to see was inside Peter. Even though the story was told through his lens, he never lost sight of it being Ava’s book—was this professionalism? Love? Or, like Ava, fear? These two characters from different walks of life turned out to not be so different in their separate desires to be approved of and loved for an uncensored version of themselves. AVA: The Secret Conversations was a beautiful story about the human desire for connection and how those connections can hurt and heal, even from the least likely of places.

I attended this performance on a press pass from The Press Room.