Hartford is proud of its history.

"Chick, The Great Osram," which opened Friday at the Hartford Stage, is a new play about Chick Austin, former director of the Wadsworth Atheneum, the nation's oldest public art museum. Michael Wilson directs.

It's a two-person show, with Robert Sella in the title role and Enid Graham as his wife, Helen.

As a history lesson about a charismatic force in the city's cultural tapestry, it's terrific.

As drama, it's not.

The 90-minute intermissionless play by David Grimm opens in a Trinity College classroom as Austin shows up a little late and a little hung over to deliver an art lecture. He's wearing his ringmaster outfit, with red coat and top hat, having arrived from his famous "Paper Ball" at the Atheneum, the social event of 1936. Here Sella quickly conveys Austin's passion for art, his love of the modern masters and his disdain for the inner workings of the museum's board which holds the money strings.

Grimm's fact-based script draws from Eugene R. Gaddis' excellent 2000 biography, "Magician of the Modern, Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America."

And that's no small claim. Between Austin's arrival in 1927 and his official departure in 1945, Austin made the Atheneum a destination for the brightest lights in the art world. He curated the first surrealist show in America in 1931, which included Salvador Dali's "Persistence of Memory." In 1933 he helped bring over dance master George Balanchine from Russia with the intention of starting a professional school in Hartford. (The plan failed when local dance teachers protested and Balanchine decamped to New York.) He devoted an entire show to Picasso in 1934, the first American museum to do so. That same year he put on the First International Style interior show. And he presented "Four Saints in Three Acts" by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson with an all-black cast.

Grimm touches on all these accomplishments in the opening lecture; Sella does a good job projecting the charm and eccentricities of Austin.

The second scene shifts to Helen at their iconic home on Scarborough Street (18 feet deep and 86 feet wide). As she waits for Chick's telephone call late in the evening she looks every bit the cultured society matron from the wealthy Goodwin family. (Her Uncle Charlie is the head of the Atheneum board and hired Chick.) She and Chick married in Paris in 1929 and had two children.

But as Enid Graham plays out this scene, which starts slowly and builds, we learn that all is not happy in this household. Chick travels frequently, without her, on art buying trips and vacations with others. It is here that the play's largest drama occurs. Helen adores her husband, and states the dilemma she has faced her whole life "Am I enough"? She thinks back to her single days when she didn't worry so much about living up to expectations of family or boyfriends. But in Chick Austin she met someone extraordinary and even if it means sharing him with a series of male lovers and the demands of his job, she does it. Graham's subtle shifts of speech, facial expression and posture convey her conflict.

Grimm's final scene has a much less confident older Chick dressed as his alter ego, the Great Osram. He took on this persona when performing his magic act, often to raise funds for the museum. Like Osram, Austin produced his own kind of magic, cajoling the provincial board in Hartford to buy Caravaggio paintings and Picasso prints, moving the colonial furniture collections to a less prominent place and staying up nights to hang shows. He literally pulls rabbits out of hats.

This final act is the least satisfying of the three as Chick morphs from the magician pulling the strings to a puppet in the hand of some supernatural force. He's left his job at the Atheneum. It's 1957 and a lifelong habit of Chesterfields has caught up with him.

It's tough to wring drama out of what are essentially three long monologues. It's no fault of the actors. Grimm's play does give a capsule portrait of the lives of these extraordinary people, but, aside from a few moments in the second scene, there's not much conflict when one actor is holding court.

As a history lesson, it's worth an evening. But if you're looking for drama, read the book.

CHICK, THE GREAT OSRAM continues through Nov. 11 at Hartford Stage, 50 Church St. Hartford. Tickets are Tickets are $23 to $64. Information: 860-527-5151 and www.hartfordstage.org.

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