INTERVIEW: In new play, Alessandra Assaf channels Ava Gardner
Photo: Alessandra Assaf stars in Twelve O’Clock Tales With Ava Gardner. Photo courtesy of Frank Ishman / Provided by Lucy Pollak PR with permission.
Alessandra Assaf hasn’t been on a theatrical stage for nearly two decades, so when she headed down on Saturday mornings to a local theater for a writing workshop, she didn’t think much would come from the experience. She stayed focused on her writing and never thought a return to the stage was in her future.
Well, Ava Gardner, the late, great Hollywood star, had other plans for Assaf.
From that writing workshop emerged Twelve O’Clock Tales With Ava Gardner, a new solo show co-written by and starring Assaf. The show continues through March 5 at the Whitefire Theatre in Sherman Oaks, California.
“There was a free writing class on Saturday mornings offered at a theater, and I started going to that writing class,” Assaf said in a recent phone interview. “I didn’t know anything about the soaring solo community here in Los Angeles, this community of artists who get up and perform full-length plays of whatever material they hatch out of these workshops, so I had no intention of performing. I was not a performer anymore. I had somewhat left the theater in 2004, always loved the theater, kept going to the theater, but as a performer I had hung my hat.”
When Assaf stood up at these workshops and began reading her material, she received a lot of support from everyone in the room. Slowly but surely, she started to craft Twelve O’Clock Tales With Ava Gardner, which was ultimately co-written with Michael Lorre. Michael A. Shepperd directs the production.
The show takes place in 1974 when Gardner is on the set of Earthquake, her first Hollywood blockbuster in quite some time, according to press notes. While in her dressing room she reflects upon her life, from growing up in North Carolina to her advocacy of civil rights to her many films and romantic relationships over the years.
“I noticed a theme emerging where I was talking about beauty and physical magnificence quite a bit, and that led me to Ava Gardner,” Assaf said. “She is kind of beauty defined, beauty walking on earth, physical perfection in my eye, so that’s how it happened. As I’ve said before, you didn’t use the word beautiful in my family unless you were describing Ava Gardner. She was the pinnacle. She was the epitome of that word, and I found a very intriguing woman. She was more than just a pretty face. She was actually quite smart and had a lot of moxie and was quick to defend the underdog. There was so much about her spirit that I fell in love with, and I felt that story needed to be told. People needed to be reminded of her.”
Assaf predicts that the older theatergoers will enjoy the solo show because it transports them back in time to a bygone era of Hollywood history. Who doesn’t love a little tale about Gardner and Frank Sinatra, or Gardner with her friends Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge? However, Assaf is hoping the material hits younger audience members as well.
“I really think that she is a figure that could inspire and attract younger audiences because I like to say that she had the sensibilities of today’s Millennial woman, with sovereignty over herself and agency, enjoying her sexuality before we had terminology like a ‘woman’s right to choose,’” she said, adding that Gardner fought against racism and always tried to help those were treated unfairly.
“Ava Gardner just had a strong solid sense of herself,” Assaf said. “She knew who she was, and anytime anybody tried to clip her wings, that’s why she was so temperamental and why she had such rage and why she had such difficult relationships with men because they all wanted to dominate her. She refused to be dominated, put in a cage, to have her wings clipped.”
When Assaf performed the piece for the first time in front of a paying audience, she had a lot of butterflies in her stomach. On a personal level, this show has offered quite the journey and finally returned her to the stage as a performer once again.
“It was an out-of-body experience,” Assaf said about the first performance. “I was terribly, terribly nervous. I had had readings of the script before audiences before, but this really felt like a personal rite of passage for me, getting up on stage after so many years, with the play memorized, and the blocking, and the props, jittery fingers. But you know how it is, every performer will tell you that you’re out of your mind, terrified backstage waiting to go on, and the first few minutes you feel those nerves. But then all of a sudden you click into something, and then off you go. The next thing you know 80 minutes later you’re at the curtain call. It was an out-of-body experience, but it was also a glorious, stellar experience.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Twelve O’Clock Tales With Ava Gardner, written by Alessandra Assaf and Michael Lorre, continues through March 5 at the Whitefire Theatre in Sherman Oaks, California. Assaf stars in the production, which is directed by Michael A. Shepperd. Click here for more information and tickets.
