RE: Tea at Five. I purchased it primarily for Kate Mulgrew speaking in Katharine Hepburn's accent, theatrical content regardless.
As for the script: There were sections pulled almost verbatim from Me: Stories of my Life, which was a bit tacky/tasteless. You could tell it was written in ~48-72 hours, as it was just a hastily compiled set of anecdotes from interviews (which were few and far between to begin with) and her autobiography. That said, Kate does a marvelous job with the material she's given, and manages to infuse it with some originality rather than a rote recitation of biographical passages. I was not fond of the monologue about Tom, but artistic liberties exist, etc etc.
Also it is 1 AM so I will stop talking about Tea at Five--didn't necessarily come out of the Devil's cunt, but was certainly not a masterpiece by any means. I liked it, even if it was plodding/predictable/paraphrased.
How does that old adage go again?
All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to; the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.
I suppose this much is true, but it by no means excuses misinterpretation or flat-out libel under the guise of “artistic liberties.” At one point I had a draft of a re-worked script, and I found it a cheap bit of dime-store psychology masquerading as a play—and a bit of an insult to both Kate’s memory and the memory of her parents. [I know this wasn’t the intent.] The fault lies in Lombardo’s play, not Mulgrew’s performance—the same case can also be made for Cate Blanchett’s “Kate”. The dramatic license he took, attempting to get into her head vis a vis her relationship with her father, was simplistic to say the least and a total guess on his part. Problem with this kind of “entertainment” is that it is accepted as truth by the general public who only know the talking points of her life, if that. Is it the worst thing ever written about Kate? No. That honor belongs elsewhere. Does it do her a disservice? Maybe not—because it’s really pretty inconsequential; just a blip on the radar. The quality of the theatre experience ideally should be a marriage of performance and material. Here the material lets everyone down, especially Hepburn fans. And it’s not that I’m completely adverse to a Hepburn play, neitha. In the right hands, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more—to borrow a word from someone—fascinating subject for a one-woman piece. Except that with all the revisionist history that seems to be going on as of late, I doubt one will ever see the light of day.
(Unless I write the damn thing myself.)

So. Theyah we ahre.