Kathleen Chalfant and Richard Easton to Headline Off-Broadway Revival of Painting Churches

Tony nominee Kathleen Chalfant and Tony winner Richard Easton will star in Keen Company’s forthcoming off-Broadway revival of Tina Howe’s Painting Churches. Performances will begin on February 14, 2012, at the Clurman Theatre on Theatre Row, with opening night set for March 6, directed by Keen artistic director Carl Forsman. Additional casting and design team will be announced shortly.

Painting Churches centers on Fanny (Chalfant) and Gardner (Easton) Church, who are packing before moving to a beach home on Cape Cod. Gardner is a poet and Fanny is from a “fine old family.” Their daughter Margaret, an artist who lives in New York, has arrived to help them pack and paint their portrait.

The play was first produced by Second Stage in 1983 in an acclaimed production that starred Marian Seldes, Geroge N. Martin and Elizabeth McGovern. It was later filmed for PBS' “American Playhouse” starring Sada Thompson, Donald Moffat, and Roxanne Hart.

Chalfant received a Tony nomination for Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and won multiple awards for creating the role of Vivian Bearing in Margaret Edson’s Wit. Other off-Broadway credits include Talking Heads, Family Week, Dead Man’s Cell Phone and Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell.

Easton won a Tony for The Invention of Love and has appeared on Broadway in Elling, The Coast of Utopia, The Rivals, Henry IV, Noises Off, Exit the King, The Misanthrope, The Cherry Orchard, Hamlet, Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy, Back to Methuselah, The Country Wife and School for Scandal. He appeared in HBO’s Mildred Pierce and was recently scalped to death on Boardwalk Empire.