It's shaping up to be a busy season for actress Kathleen Chalfant: Hot on the heels of an announcement that Chalfant will star in the New York premiere of Howard Barker's 1992 drama A Hard Heart for the Epic Theatre Ensemble from October 30 to December 2, Playwrights Horizons has confirmed that she will appear in Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone in the off-Broadway company's mainstage theater from February 8 to March 16, 2008. The New York premiere of this latest work by Ruhl Eurydice, The Clean House will be directed by Anne Bogart.
In Dead Man's Cell Phone, Gordon is dead but his cell phone lives on. When Jean, an empathetic museum worker, answers his ringing phone beside her in a cafe, she is soon playing unwitting comforter and confessor to the man's grieving friends and family. Before she knows it, Jean is ensnarled in the underbelly of the dead man's bizarre life and is forced to confront her assumptions about morality, redemption and the need to connect in a technology-obsessed world. Chalfant has been cast as the dead man's mother; no other casting has been confirmed.
Chalfant most recently appeared off Broadway in Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell. She won a Drama Deak Award for her leading performance in Wit and received Tony and Drama Desk nominations for Angels in America: Millenium Approaches. Other Broadway credits include Angels in America: Perestroika, Racing Demon, Dance With Me and M. Butterfly. Off-Broadway credits include Great Expectations, Guantanamo, The Last Letter, Talking Heads, Savannah Bay, Far Away, The Vagina Monologues, Nine Armenians, Henry V and True History and Real Adventures.
