Twelve O’Clock Tales with Ava Gardner
Reviewed by Taylor Kass
The Whitefire Theatre
Through March 5
RECOMMENDED
“You’re too young to know Ava Gardner,” said the audience member sitting next to me as I took my seat. He was right; this reviewer is admittedly Gen Z. But when I asked him to share his favorite film of hers, he couldn’t name one. All he could remember about Ava Gardner was that he was in love with her. And that’s just the thing about Ava, a screen icon whose striking beauty and salacious personal life — three husbands including Mickey Rooney and Frank Sinatra, plus a slew of rich and famous lovers — often eclipsed her genuine acting talent. Playwright Alessandra Assaf has crafted and stars in a one-woman show that peels back the curtain on this revered yet misunderstood figure. In its world premiere production co-written by Michael Lorre and directed by Michael A. Shepperd, Twelve O’Clock Tales with Ava Gardner finds the humanity in a woman described as “The World’s Most Beautiful Animal.”
Twelve O’Clock Tales catches Ava at an intimate moment. Thirty years into her career, she’s taking a break in her dressing room on the set of Earthquake as special effect techs struggle to set up a stunt. Ava starts sipping a martini (or two) as she chats to her unseen assistant Reenie and takes the opportunity to tell a few tales to a tape recorder that she plans to use to write her memoir. She takes us through the whirlwind of the 1940s and 50s, from growing up as the daughter of sharecroppers, to being discovered via a photograph and whisked away to Hollywood, to landing her first leading roles and gaining mainstream acclaim. But it’s Ava’s romantic relationships that shape the narrative of Twelve O’Clock Tales. Ava’s greatest desire is to love and be loved, but the men who pursue her for her beauty and fame despise her for it. A bit like the public who condemn her for her sexuality as they lust after every detail of her affairs.
As Ava, Assaf is a sharply focused storyteller and unflappably glamorous. Even when recounting humiliating jabs from Ava’s first husband Mickey Rooney or horrific abuse at the hands of her former lover George C. Scott, she never drops her carefully curated aura of grace. Assaf luxuriates in every gesture, every word dripping with a dialect somewhere in between a Southern drawl and a mid-Atlantic accent. Twelve O’Clock Tales never quite gives us a truly raw Ava, but maybe that’s the point. Somewhere along the line, Ava from small-town Grabtown, North Carolina was thoroughly consumed by the idea of Ava Gardner, an image larger than life and even more enduring.
The Whitefire Theatre, 13500 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks; Sun., 2 pm; through March 5. https://whitefiretheatre.com or 818-687-8559. Running time: 80 minutes with no intermission.
