There are few more perilous forms of live theater than the one-person biographical show. It’s just so trite.

And solo celebrity biography? Even if it’s Elaine Stritch center stage, the potential for failure is amplified tenfold.

“Tea at Five,” Matthew Lombardo’s bioplay about late film and theater actress Katharine Hepburn, running this weekend at the Orpheum Theatre, is a prime example of a mono-drama that teeters undecidedly between failure and artistic victory.
It isn’t anchored by much of a script. What’s here is a trifling pastiche of anecdotes, quotes and remembrances cribbed from other sources. Lombardo’s creation is equal parts smoochy love offering to the actress and a cheap-and-
easy psychological glue-job that doesn't hold up well under audience scrutiny, or under its own awkward segues.

The play’s basic construct is clever — act one is Hepburn at 31, with a string of film flops at her feet; act two finds her at age 76, looking back at a legacy of achievement and acclaim and one tumultuous love affair with Spencer Tracy — but cleverness hardly translates to compellingness on its own.

Thank goodness, then, that “Tea’s” scriptural shortcomings are overcome by what’s grand about the production: It affords opportunity for one of the most articulated, natural channelings of Hepburn the stage will probably ever offer — provided by Kate Mulgrew, of “Star Trek: Voyager” fame.

Mulgrew woos the audience in waves, first with her physical resemblance to Hepburn (fair skin, tall forehead, somewhat angular features, a body elongated by four-inch heels), then by her voice (that husky, haughty, upper-crust tone), then — and this is where I was hooked — by her mannerisms.

Early in the play, Mulgrew walks toward a floral print couch in her family’s Connecticut home (where the whole of the show takes place) and transforms a tomboy pounce into a delicate piece of ballet: Mulgrew extends one leg outward then leaps slightly into the air, tucking the other leg up to a point, landing with her back on the couch in mid-recline to slice open a piece of mail with her finger.

It's one of many boyish, kinetic moves Mulgrew’s Katharine will make across the set, and across “Tea at Five’s” almost two hours, both to keep audiences’ attention and to demonstrate for us what we always assumed about Hepburn, that whatever feminine grace she exhibited onscreen was a kind of fabrication, little more than a means to an end.
Hepburn admirers will enjoy “Tea at Five” if only because of Mulgrew’s virtuoso performance, though they’ll likely have heard the show’s anecdotes already. Those looking for insight into the actress’s life, however, will come away from this one-woman Cliff’s Notes biography sorely disappointed.