Pretty early on, watching Kate Mulgrew impersonate Kate Hepburn in "Tea at Five" at Seattle Repertory Theatre, I yearned to go home and revisit "The Philadelphia Story." That luminous 1940 concoction - adapted from a play Philip Barry wrote especially for Hepburn, deftly directed by George Cukor, divinely performed by Kate, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart - both adored and punished Hepburn's Athena-like character. For aiming at impossible ideals that leave mere mortals in the dust, the goddess had to be brought down to earth, a flawed and passionate woman.
There are moments of unbearable vulnerability in "The Philadelphia Story," moments when you swear Hepburn must have been feeling in her bones how hard it was to stand and shine in her own radiant dream of herself, while movie father (John Halladay) and ex-husband (Grant) ranked her cold, disappointing, overbearing. The power of Cukor's film lies in the psychic push and pull between men and women - between movie stars and audiences - that involves the pleasure of falling off a lonely pedestal, the triumph of toppling it, the queer ache where it used to stand.
You'll find few of those provocative ambiguities abroad in "Tea at Five," Matthew Lombardo's wafer-thin divertissement in two acts: the first featuring a garrulous 31-year-old Katharine Hepburn, stigmatized as "box-office poison" after seven movie flops, and the second focused on Kate at 76, palsied, given to remembrance of things past.
In both eras, the actress has retreated to her comfortable family home in Fenwick, Conn., where a mighty thunderstorm and a quiet snowfall provide symbolic weather for the lady's state of mind and body. Following a family-driven ritual of serving tea at 5, Mulgrew's Hepburn treats the audience as privileged guest, confidante, confessor - spilling her guts to strangers in a way that oddly contradicts the actress's rep for reticence.
Nowhere near a play, more a mélange of fan factoids and pop psychology, what's the raison d'être of an uncategorizable thing like "Tea"? To feed off the power of legend? Surely the creator of this fluff didn't delude himself that he was mining drama for revelations of character? Let's be forgiving and assume the purpose was simply to serve up a couple of hours of undemanding amusement, showcasing Kate Mulgrew's considerable skills at suggesting Hepburn in shorthand.
From first encounter, I've always rooted for bigger and better roles in Kate Mulgrew's career. How can one not value the way she telegraphs an authenticity of personality, an unbending sense of self that confidently, firmly informs her performances. Movies don't have a lot of room for unshrinking violets like Mulgrew, who's a little "too much" for conventional female roles.
Her voice alone - with a range from patrician purr to cutting authority - demands attention, spacious dramatic arenas. (Not surprisingly, Mulgrew's career has included voicing goddesses and queens in numerous animations.) Perhaps she found her best home in the larger-than-life genre of science fiction, playing "Star Trek: Voyager"'s Capt. Janeway for seven seasons.
That marvelously idiosyncratic voice precedes Mulgrew's appearance on stage in "Tea at Five." There's no doubt it does honor to Hepburn's silk-and-bray style, and Kate M. occasionally catches some of Kate H.'s narcissistic panache: for instance, the way she liked to throw back her head and gaze upward, allowing God - and the light - to savor those incomparable cheekbones.
In the first act, Mulgrew does her damnedest to express the actress's physical restlessness and grace - most wonderfully on display in "Bringing Up Baby," the best film she ever made (and, amazingly, one that helped earn her the "box-office poison " label in 1938). But striding mannishly about, plopping down with legs spread, lounging dramatically in every possible position and place fails to capture the uniquely exhilarating quality of Hepburn-in-motion. There's something cartoonish about this energy, as though the actress had turned dervish.
And, not to put too fine a point on it, Mulgrew is just too busty and lacking in stature to channel the lanky angularity and outright boyishness of a woman who so loved being taller than everyone (even "Spence"), she wore heels to accentuate her height.
But it's "Tea"'s facile Freudianizing that's most irritating. According to Lombardo's quick-time analysis, the most influential men in Hepburn's life were either brutes who treated her like a doormat or weaklings who abandoned or disappointed her. She grew up with a stern doctor dad who showed disgust for a wife who wept over her lost son. Having blocked her ambition by threatening divorce, he erased the woman's very life by burning all her papers when she died.
And Spencer Tracy, as described in "Tea," sounds like dad's soulmate. At their first meeting, Tracy promised to "cut her down to size." (In alternate histories, Kate remarked that Tracy wasn't very tall; producer Joe Mankiewicz assured her that was OK, "he'll cut you down to size.") Once, in public, he cruelly admonished Hepburn to "take that feather out of your ass when you talk to me." The aristocrat slept on the floor beside his bed when he was incapacitated after a bender.
The woman who was feminist icon, demoted to a fan of paternalistic Bad Boys. The complexity of character and talent, reduced to something like soap opera. The mystery that was Katharine Hepburn boiled down to easy-to-grasp neuroses. "She was a brave little soul who made herself into a silver arrow," Mulgrew opined in one interview. Something a little condescending and middle-brow about that reading, though the image of Hepburn as silver arrow is apt (see her as shining aviatrix in Dorothy Arzner's "Christopher Strong").
Still, Mulgrew gets close to depth of performance when she recounts Hepburn's love and sense of responsibility for Tom, the 15-year-old brother who called her "his best girl" and then hanged himself, without explanation. It was she, at 14, who found him and cut him down.
In the silent months that follow, the grief-stricken teen decides to become Tom. After she cuts off and bleaches her red hair, she dresses in his clothes and presents herself to ungiving father, a girl acting as boy to garner approval. You have to wonder how this traumatic masquerade may have fueled Hepburn's superb "Sylvia Scarlett," a Shakespearean foray into the tricky territory of gender and performance (and, yes, another "flop" in its day).
"Tea at Five" quotes Dorothy Parker's sharp-tongued review of Hepburn's stage performance in the disastrous "The Lake": "Her emotions ran the gamut from A to B." That Kate Mulgrew makes it deeper into the emotional alphabet is a tribute to her own rich acting gifts, with which she staunchly stretches the small-time dramatic envelope confining her.[[In-content Ad]]
