" Kate is Kate " — that’s what some reviewers will write, if they haven’t already. And they’ll be correct, since as luck would have it, Kate Mulgrew has the same given name as Kate Hepburn. Mulgrew portrays Hepburn in Matthew Lombardo’s one-person play Tea at Five, which had its world premiere last February at Hartford Stage and has now come, in the Hartford Stage Production, to the Loeb Drama Center for a two-week run on its way to a hoped-for Broadway engagement. And more often than not, her Hepburn is eerie in its evocation of the great actress’s trademark vocal and physical mannerisms. But Tea at Five serves up cake and cookies rather than a substantial meal, and it asks, once more, what moves us to keep rewriting the lives of living persons.

My first experience with Katharine Hepburn came from looking at my mother’s photo album. Miss Hepburn and Miss Orr were at Bryn Mawr together, and in 1927 they both appeared in the college’s production of Gregorio Martínez Sierra’s The Cradle Song. Miss Hepburn played Teresa; Miss Orr had a secondary role. Miss Hepburn was the focus of the New York Times review; Miss Orr was not mentioned. My mother might not have been a great actress, but she did look a little like Hepburn. Kate Mulgrew really doesn’t look like Hepburn: the face is much fuller, and I can’t see the dangerous glint in her eyes or the wounded hopefulness in her mouth that I saw in dozens of stage, film, and television productions. The physical mannerisms don’t look the same on Mulgrew, and though the vocal resemblance can be astonishing, particularly when she clenches her teeth, at times I still hear the Captain Janeway of Star Trek: Voyager or the Janet Eldridge of Cheers or the Kate Columbo/Callahan of Kate Loves a Mystery.

Set in September 1938, act one of Lombardo’s play finds the actress alone at the family’s summer home in Fenwick, Connecticut, on the eve of a hurricane that will blow the house away. She talks about her string of movie flops (including Bringing Up Baby!) and her reputation as " box-office poison " even as she angles with her agent, over the phone, for the part of Scarlett O’Hara in the upcoming Gone with the Wind; she gives us a glimpse of family members and ex-husband Ludlow Ogden Smith and one-time beau Howard Hughes, and we hear about her early acting career. The phone rings: she’s lost Scarlett to Vivien Leigh. The doorbell rings: it’s a consolation prize from Howard, the film rights to Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story.

Act two is set in February 1983, just after the actress has broken her ankle in a car accident. Hobbling on a cane, denying rumors of Parkinson’s disease while downing Scotch, she pleads ill health to calls from Warren Beatty (who wants her to appear with him in a movie), fills us in on the hurricane of ’38, tells us a bit about her brother Tom, who hanged himself when she was 14, tells us a bit about the love of her life, Spencer Tracy, brings us up to date on her career, and reflects on life before calling Warren and saying yes to (the 1994 film) Love Affair.

Tony Straiges’s living room creates a homy if unenlightening ambiance: brick fireplace, cushy sofa, coffee table, grandfather clock, magazine basket, golf clubs, tennis racquets in act one, masks and animal sculptures from Africa and Oceania and a high-wheeler in act two. And there’s impressive weather: scudding clouds and sheeting rain in act one, snow in act two. But I still had the feeling I was watching the Walt Disney or Reader’s Digest version of Katharine Hepburn’s life. Matthew Lombardo’s script is full of goes-down-easy wisdom like " You may not believe it from me, but I always wanted a happy ending " and, in reference to what’d she change if her life could have an alternate reel, " not a goddamn thing. " The stories Hepburn tells in her aptly titled memoir Me are so much more interesting: how she made a hole-in-one on the day of the hurricane, and how the family members had to lower themselves out the window just before the house sailed away, or how she very nearly did get to play Scarlett.

It’s one thing to watch Hal Holbrook impersonate Mark Twain, or Julie Harris do Emily Dickinson, because we have to guess at what those persons were really like. But we have Katharine Hepburn not only in her own words but in her own image on film. I don’t need to see another actress, even a decent one like Mulgrew, try to duplicate her. Tea at Five makes comfort food out of a woman who was anything but.