The Baltimore Shakespeare Festival takes occasional detours away from the sacred canon of the Bard's tragedies and comedies. The ensemble's latest such excursion is a winning one-woman vehicle, "Mrs. Kemble's Tempest," which manages to fuse a hearty dose of Shakespeare with a sketch of an acclaimed 19th century actress.

Biographical solo shows can get creaky and overly contrived, not to mention superficial. But this new play by Tom Ziegler is remarkably successful at resurrecting a distant figure and weaving the events of her life into a coherent, at times quite compelling, scenario. It helps, of course, that Fanny Kemble did so many interesting things worth recalling.

She became an overnight star of the British stage in 1829, soon conquered the American public and was particularly lionized for her Shakespearean repertoire. She married an American who, she discovered to her horror, owed his fortune to his slave holdings; that discovery led her to become an early, ardent and persuasive advocate for abolition - and led to her divorce as well.

The actress subsequently supported herself reading from Shakespeare's plays, and that part of her career provided Ziegler with an effective theatrical device.

Kimberly Schraf gives a dexterous, incisive portrayal of Kemble, who, in the midst of what is to be her farewell appearance, starts wandering into tales of her own life as she recites passages from "The Tempest." The real Kemble was famed for carefully and colorfully delineating all the characters in a Shakespeare work; Schraf does that here with an impressive flourish.

She also brings to the autobiographical asides considerable naturalness and nuance. One example comes in the passage when Kemble, sensing that some in her audience must be wondering, tries to explain her initial ignorance of her husband's source of wealth. Schraf subtly lays bear the woman's inner pain as she says, "The very nature of deception requires - does it not? - at least some participation by the victim."

The simple production, given effective pacing by director Lee Mikeska Gardner, also features the able Esther Covington in the silent role of the put-upon Pianist engaged to provide musical mood music for Kemble's recitations. This is, though, every bit Schraf's show, and she enlivens it with a finely shaded acting style that helps conjure a fascinating, long-ago star back onto the stage.