At 81, Kathleen Chalfant, Back on Broadway in ‘Here There Are Blueberries,’ Is Just Getting Started

Kathleen Chalfant has been one of the most prolific and admired stage and screen actresses around for decades. Not that she would know it from looking at reviews of her work. “I used to read them,” she explains, “and then I took Laurence Olivier’s advice, which is you must never read your reviews, because the bad ones are devastating and the good ones are never good enough.”Were Ms. Chalfant, 81, to change her policy, she might be in for a pleasant surprise — though not a complete shock, surely, as she has collected pretty much every major honor given for off-Broadway performances, in addition to special Lucille Lortel and Obie Awards for sustained excellence and lifetime achievement, respectively. She received her latest glowing notices for a Broadway production, her first in more than 30 years: Tectonic Theater Project’s “Here There Are Blueberries,” a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist that just opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre following well-received runs at New York Theatre Workshop and in other cities.Conceived by acclaimed playwright and director Moisés Kaufman and co-written by Mr. Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, “Blueberries” was inspired by the discovery nearly two decades ago of a photo album that had belonged to Karl Höcker, who served as adjutant to Richard Baer, the SS commandant in charge of operations at the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camps. The pictures, central to the production, show not prisoners but staff members, and some of their leaders, enjoying leisure time.Ms. Chalfant has been a fan of Tectonic since Mr. Kaufman founded the company with Jeffrey LaHoste in 1991; eleven years later, she appeared in an HBO adaptation of one of its most celebrated works, “The Laramie Project,” also directed by Mr. Kaufman from a screenplay he co-wrote. Mr. Kaufman tapped Ms. Chalfant for “Blueberries” six years ago, during its workshop stage, and while she wasn’t available for its 2022 world premiere at California’s La Jolla Playhouse, she did join subsequent productions in Washington, D.C., and at NYTW. Kathleen Chalfant in ‘Familiar Touch.’ Via Music Box FilmsThe actors in “Blueberries” — among them “splendid” Broadway newcomers, Ms. Chalfant points out — play real people; Ms. Chalfant’s principal role is Judy Cohen, who as chief photo archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gave a junior colleague the green light to pursue the album. The actress first met Ms. Cohen “on the way to the theater for opening night in Washington, D.C. She was coming down the street with her two daughters, in a very spiffy dress, I have to say.”Ms. Cohen also showed up for opening night on Broadway: “She came with her husband. We all met before the play, because there was a red carpet, and I thought about her a lot while I was onstage. I hope I was doing honor to the importance of her work — to the courage she showed being in a senior position and accepting this material into the museum, and her generosity to her young colleague.”Ms. Chalfant has played other real-life women onstage before, from Rose Kennedy to Emily Dickinson’s posthumous editor, Mabel Loomis Todd, to Joan Didion in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” a theatrical adaptation of Didion’s memoir about losing her husband, John Gregory Dunne, written after their daughter had also died. Ms. Chalfant played the author — in a solo show, as she had with the other two roles — in intimate productions staged in apartments and homes in New York and New Haven.The actress had bigger audiences as part of the original cast of Tony Kushner’s epic “Angels in America,” which earned her a Tony Award nomination in 1993, and another Pulitzer winner, “Wit,” Margaret Edson’s account of a middle-aged professor dying of cancer. Playing that role was less difficult, she muses, than portraying Joan Didion: “Because I’m both a parent and a wife, the themes in ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ were important and close. I remember having done a reading with both my husband and my daughter in the room. My son wasn’t there, but it was an extraordinary experience.”In “Wit,” by contrast, her character transcends suffering in death. “The end is triumphant,” she argues. Though that play wouldn’t make it to Broadway until 2012, with Cynthia Nixon in the part, Ms. Chalfant played the role earlier in New Haven and off-Broadway and won a slew of prizes for it, including the Obie, Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, and Outer Critics Circle Awards.Ms. Chalfant’s record is even more remarkable when you consider that she didn’t move to New York to pursue a professional acting career in earnest until she was 28. Having graduated from college early, she married, had two children — one born while she was rehearsing to star in a production of “Major Barbara” in Woodstock — and studied acting in Italian in Rome. For her first feature film role, in 1987’s “Five Corners,” she played the mother of Tim Robbins’s character; the two became friends — Mr. Robbins “shares my politics,” Ms. Chalfant notes — and he tapped her to again portray his mom in his 1992 political satire “Bob Roberts.” Kathleen Chalfant and Tim Robbins in ‘Bob Roberts,’ 1992. Wikimedia CommonsSince then, Ms. Chalfant has juggled theater with a range of high-profile screen projects, appearing on television series such as “The Affair,” “House of Cards,” and “The Copenhagen Test.” In the 2024 film “Familiar Touch,” she played a woman adapting to assisted living and dealing with cognitive decline, and was named best actress at the Venice International Film Festival’s Orizzonti competition.“I’ve been extraordinarily lucky,” says Ms. Chalfant. “I guess because I never was an ingénue, and never a great beauty, so that wasn’t the reason I was hired. I just got to be a person.” She’s similarly humble in explaining why she has eschewed cosmetic procedures such as Botox injections: “I’m a coward,” she insists.She adds, “We’re living in an aging society now, as everyone points out, so there are more parts for people who are older…People say that 80 is the new 60, though I’m not sure that’s true.” But the scripts keep coming: “One of the great joys of having done this for so long and knowing so many people is to be able to say, ‘I shouldn’t do this, but this is the person you should call.’ I think everybody does it. Most actors are very generous.”Gratitude is also a factor, it seems. Back when Ms. Chalfant began studying with Wynn Handman, a disciple of the hugely influential acting teacher Sanford Meisner, she doubted her prospects. “I thought that since I was 28, that ship had sailed. But it turns out that 28 is not the end of your life.” More than half a century later, in fact, she has no plans to stop, “if they’ll have me. As long as they don’t demand Botox.”

At 81, Kathleen Chalfant, Back on Broadway in ‘Here There Are Blueberries,’ Is Just Getting Started

At 81, Kathleen Chalfant, Back on Broadway in ‘Here There Are Blueberries,’ Is Just Getting Started

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