Actress Broome captures Hepburn's essence in `Tea at Five'.

Byline: Paul Kolas

COLUMN: THEATER REVIEW

WORCESTER - The first thing that comes to mind after watching "Tea at Five" is what would someone as inscrutably private as Katharine Hepburn think of Matthew Lombardo's wholly engaging distillation of two periods of her life. She'd probably scoff at the liberty taken with the fact that she never agreed to finally accept Warren Beatty's offer to appear in his "Love Affair" remake of "An Affair to Remember" until 1993 (the film was released in 1994.)

Lombardo moves the time up a full decade to allow for the play's closing line. No doubt Kate the Great would have sniffed at a number of details with her trademark imperious demeanor.

But she'd probably be hard pressed to repress an incipient smile at the gorgeously realized incarnation of her that Amelia Broome gave to an enraptured Foothills Theatre audience on Sunday afternoon. This is not simply a case of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, but an actress reaching deep down into the enigma of an icon and wringing up a performance that mingles the conversational and the magisterial in breathtaking ways. Her Hepburn is both intimidating and vulnerable, but even when she is at her most revealing, you feel the facade of fame and self-aggrandizement getting in the way of total confession. After all, how can any form of biography tell us everything we want to know? Everything is doled out the Hepburn way, on her regally endorsed terms. Take it or leave it.

The play's first act takes place in 1938, giving us a look at Hepburn's early career, when she was momentarily stunted by a series of box office flops that labeled her "unbankable" by studio heads. We find out how much she coveted the role of Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With the Wind," and how devastated she was when the role went to Vivien Leigh ("she's an unknown, for God's sake, and English to boot!").

But it seems that she had her own version of Tara, the Hepburn Estate in Fenwick, Conn., where she retreated to fret over her career slump while awaiting casting word on Selznick's Civil War epic. Even then, as Lombardo's version of events would have it, a hurricane was about to wash away to sea the family home on the same day word of Leigh's casting was announced and Hepburn received by mail the play that would revive her stardom: Philip Barry's "The Philadelphia Story."

Broome's Hepburn displays an alpha female sensuality here, a lioness wounded by the unwitting rabble that can't deal with her outsized talent unless it can be measured in dollars and cents. She'll relate something to the audience about her socially reformative parents, or a tenderly recalled memory about going to the cinema with her brother Tom, or refusing to star in her brother Dick's "dreadful" play, then run to the ringing phone, barking into it with acid-reflex sarcasm when she doesn't get the answer she wants from her agent.

It's like watching a legend "act" one way to the audience, and another way to those she actually dealt with. Broome manipulates, fascinates and captivates with her Bryn Mawr cultivated accent. She makes you hunger to know more about the remarkable woman she is portraying.

By the time we've learned what those 27 years with Hepburn's one great love, Spencer Tracy, were all about, at least as much as we're allowed to know near the end of Act 2, you might feel like a privileged member of the paparazzi. If she was submissive to anyone, it was to the volatile, heavy-drinking Tracy and his private demons. The second act takes place in 1983, and its most poignant moment has nothing to do with Tracy but with the tragic suicide of her brother Tom at the age of 15, which Broome recounts here with muted lament, as if Hepburn was the sort of woman who would never let her grief get the best of her. Tracy may have "cut her down to size," but her brother's fate haunted her her entire life.

Broome's transformation from a haughty and tempestuous 31-year-old to a tremulous 76-year-old addled with Parkinson's disease is both startling and masterful. Hepburn's undiminished wit is still in full flower, along with her uncompromising, aggressive attitude. Broome's performance is not just an inspired impersonation, it's a superbly noble attempt to personify someone whose best kept secrets must surely rest with her. What she and director Russell Garrett have wrought here is a singular theatrical event.

`Tea At Five'

* * * *

Written by Matthew Lombardo, directed by Russell Garrett. Presented by Foothills Theatre Company, 100 Front St., Worcester. Performances run through March 2, Thursdays-Sundays, at various times. Tickets are $30-$35, depending on date and time of performance. Call [phone] for reservations, performance times or further information, or visit www.foothillstheatre.com.

With Amelia Broome as Katharine Hepburn.

ART: PHOTO

CUTLINE: Amelia Broome stars as Katharine Hepburn in the Foothills Theatre Company production of "Tea at Five."