Joey Parsons, Kate Hamill, and Matthew Saldívar Photo by James Leynse

Hamill, who stars as the title character and is on stage for pretty much the entire two-hour play, sets her sights on the 17th century Italian artist who eschewed art as the embodiment of idealism for a more naturalistic style. But the play itself might well have been called Mostly An Art Lecture and Feminist Monologue Based on the Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi.

It opens in an art studio, in which a very large blank canvas stands before us. Artemisia looks out over the audience and goes into what sounds like the first day of an art history class, or perhaps a talk by a museum docent. "Composition," she says. "That's where you begin." She continues along these lines for a while, declaiming on the process of creating a work of art. And then she suddenly stops herself, drops the lecture, and goes into her autobiography, with many of her speeches punctuated by the triple repetition of the first person singular pronoun: "I, I, I," as in "I, I, I. Born into this world Artemisia Gentileschi. When I come squalling into the sweltering swamp air of Rome, 1593."

This is the general shape of the play, stiffly directed by Jade King Carroll: direct address to the audience, combined with short scenes in which pieces of the story are acted out by Hamill and the other five cast members. We follow Gentileschi from her childhood, raised by her indulgent artist father after the death of her mother, through the trauma of a sexual assault and subsequent trial of her assailant, and later finding success in her own right, out of the shadows of her past.

With Hamill-as-Gentileschi dominating the dialogue, there is not a great deal left for the rest of the cast to do other than to illustrate her words, though they do their best to bring some actual characterization. Matthew Saldívar gives us a worthy villain as the predatory Agostino, and Joey Parsons manages to juggle four different roles with genuine flair. But as the play turns to the assault and its consequences, Hamill turns more and more to relying on a mode of diatribe that frustrates at least as much as it enlightens. And that's a shame, because the story of Artemisia Gentileschi is surely worthy of being told, a woman with the courage to seek out and find her own path in a man's world. But the path that has been selected for the telling offers rather more style than substance.