Los Angeles Times, CA
May 8 2008

Kathleen Chalfant, ‘Red Dog Howls,’ tackle the Armenian genocide

The veteran actress plays a 91-year-old survivor in the play.

By Patrick Pacheco, Special to The Times
May 11, 2008
New York

KATHLEEN Chalfant is recalling the first time she rented the British
actress Miriam Margolyes’ house in Tuscany, now an annual summer
ritual for the Chalfant family. "Let’s see, it was 10 years ago, just
after my brother’s death," she says, digging into a plate of crab
salad. "It will be 10 years. . . ." She pauses. "Oh, my God, that’s
today."

Just the barest flicker of emotion crosses over the 63-year-old
actress’ luminous blue eyes, even though Chalfant was close to her
brother, Alan Palmer, a San Francisco restaurateur and political
fundraiser. Her moving astringency is typical of the emotional
discipline she has brought to myriad great performances, including her
turns — rabbi, Mormon mother, Ethel Rosenberg — in Tony Kushner’s
"Angels in America" (for which she received a Tony nomination); her
Vivian Bearing, the acerbic John Donne scholar dying of cancer in
Margaret Edson’s "Wit"; and, more recently, her imperious matriarch in
Sarah Ruhl’s "Dead Man’s Cell Phone."

Now Chalfant is applying that extraordinary rigor in a new play, "Red
Dog Howls," in the role of Rose Afratian, a fierce and haunted
91-year-old survivor of the massacres of Armenians that began in
1915. Red Dog HowlsThe memory play by Alexander Dinelaris examines the
legacy of violence and its effect on Rose’s young grandson,
Michael. On the cusp of beginning his own family and while going
through his dead father’s personal effects, Michael discovers letters
that lead to a grandmother he’s never known, uncovering terrible
wounds for both. The play opens Wednesday at the El Portal Theatre in
North Hollywood.

"Kathleen is one of the few great actresses of the stage who can
handle stern comedy and enormous gravitas," Dinelaris says. "The
character may be 91, but the audience has to believe she could live
another 30 years. Kathleen conveys the age as well the strength of a
much younger woman."

Indeed, in the rehearsal that preceded lunch, under the watch of
director Michael Peretzian, Chalfant sparred with Matthew Rauch,
playing Michael, in a scene that alternated between Rose’s dry humor
and the tension of two strangers assessing the dangers and
opportunities of a first encounter. Yet for all of Chalfant’s cerebral
cool, what one notices is an earthly sensuality — traces of the
independent child of the ’60s she once was.

"It is a surprise," acknowledges Dinelaris. "But it’s there in the way
she moves, in the kind of visceral attachment she has toward food and
in the softness she has toward family."

All of which fits well into Rose, who in the course of the play not
only lets her grandson in on searing family secrets but also
challenges him to arm-wrestling (which she wins) and continually
badgers him to eat. The latter is of a piece with the Armenian
matriarch whom Chalfant played off-Broadway in Leslie Ayvazian’s "Nine
Armenians." But that domestic play shares little with the strong
echoes of Greek tragedy in "Red Dog Howls" — something that attracted
Chalfant, who majored in the classics at Stanford.

"The central issue for a lot of my work is that violence is
irredeemable, that it does great harm to both the perpetrator and the
victim," she says. For the ancient Greeks, that violence was most
often the result of a curse placed on a family because of some
horrendous misdeed. And although Chalfant says she admires "the
practicality, realism and irony" of the Greek philosophical worldview
— "This is just the way of the world" — she is much more a child of
the enlightenment.

"I believe in the redemptive power of reason," says Chalfant. "I don’t
believe in curses. Whatever curses there are, it is in the
psychological burdens which a parent may place on one’s
children. These things can be redeemed or stopped; I don’t think it’s
necessary for children to suffer from the same lunacy as their
parents."

Parents’ part

CHALFANT’S parents — William Bishop and Norah Ford — deeded to their
daughter a bifurcated vision of the world.

"My father was fierce, dark and misanthropic," recalls Chalfant of the
man who had been in the military and then later ran boarding houses
with his wife. "My mother was the bridge to the outer world —
beautiful, charming, funny, highly tolerant and very strong. It never
occurred to me that men and women weren’t equal. But both my mother
and her mother, Nelly, who was married five times, tempered that
strength by being very sexy."

Chalfant says that she learned everything she knows about acting by
carefully observing the colorful polyglot inhabiting her parents’
businesses, first a motel in Sacramento and then a 50-room boarding
house in East Oakland. She grew up there with her parents, paternal
grandfather and maternal grandmother, who often took her to the
movies. She was weaned on 1950s melodramas, like Rita Hayworth in
"Miss Sadie Thompson." But Chalfant says she was drawn to westerns. If
there was any childhood impulse to become an actress, it came from
fantasizing about one thing: to be kissed by a cowboy.

Much to her surprise, at 17, she had her first kiss in the music room
of the boarding house — from John Miller, "a Keith Carradine
look-alike and intellectual" who eschewed acting as superficial and
encouraged Chalfant to study ancient Greek language and culture. Three
years later, she broke Miller’s heart after she met Henry Chalfant, a
painter, and ran off to Mexico with him. They married in 1966 and went
to live in Europe, first in Barcelona, where their son David, now a
musician and record producer, was born. They then moved to Rome, where
Kathleen studied acting. "I remember when we were driving back from
Mexico, I told Henry, ‘I don’t want to be stuck teaching Greek to prep
school students.’ He said, ‘What do you want to do?’ Out of the blue,
I said, ‘I want to be an actress.’ "

Her start in acting

THE COUPLE returned from Rome to the U.S. in 1971, settling in
Woodstock, N.Y., where Henry ultimately became a photographer and
documentary filmmaker. After giving birth to a daughter, Andromache
(now a set designer), Chalfant and her husband moved to New York City,
where she began a career off-off-Broadway that would be distinguished
for its sheer breadth and versatility. The actress appeared in plays
by the likes of Jules Feiffer, Christopher Durang, Maria Irene Fornés
and Samuel Beckett before making her Broadway debut in 1975 in Greg
Antonacci’s "Dance With Me." "I just wanted work, and I wanted
challenges," she said. "Yes, a lot of my work has been political, but
it’s been mostly due to good luck."

That would include getting cast early on in the development of
Kushner’s "Angels in America" and landing the role of Bearing in "Wit"
(seen at the Geffen Playhouse in 2000). In the years between the
projects, however, Chalfant was beset with a "paralyzing" fear of
acting. "I’m not sure what caused it, but I was lucky to have a very
good therapist who gave me some good advice: Don’t think about
it. And, miraculously, it worked."

She admits, with a sheepish smile, that it might well have been
physiological. "I think since then I’ve been a much braver actress,"
she says. "Only in the last couple of years, since ‘Wit,’ has it
really dawned on me that I have some skills. Now it’s fun!"

It’s ironic that "Wit," a brutally poetic play about a woman
confronting death only with the salve of her beloved John Donne,
should be Chalfant’s life raft. "Who could have known that play about
a naked, bald woman in her 50s would have had such an impact?" she
says. While she was reaching what is arguably the pinnacle of her
career with "Wit," her brother Alan, who had since moved in with the
Chalfant family, was dying of cancer.

Asked if playing in "Wit," with its unsentimental yet clarifying view
of death, was a comfort at the time, Chalfant says, "What I came to
understand was death as a particular stage of life, a mysterious
progression in the life of all beings, not a very long one. I don’t
know what came before, and I don’t know what will come after. Frankly,
I’m more concerned with the here and now and making this life a little
better than how I found it."

After spending time plumbing the tragedy of the Armenian genocide in
"Red Dog Howls," Chalfant is looking forward to Tuscany.

"There is a beautiful loggia looking over an olive grove where we take
a lot of our meals," she says, brimming with anticipation. "Alan’s
ashes are buried there; we always remember to splash his grave with a
good Brunello."