Talk about multiple personalities.
Kathleen Chalfant plays four roles in “Millennium Approaches,” the first half of “Angels in America.” In the second half, “Perestroika,” she has six parts.
In “Millennium,” which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award last year, her roles are that of a rabbi, a doctor, a Mormon mother whose son confesses to her that he is homosexual, and Ethel Rosenberg, executed as a spy. In “Perestroika” she plays all those people again, but adds two more characters: the world’s oldest Bolshevik and an angel.
You would think, with all that, she would be one very confused lady, especially considering that four of those roles are men.
Is she confused? “No,” she answers with a big smile. “But I do a lot of running up and down stairs to my dressing room, to make costume and wig changes. As a result, I think right now I’m probably in better shape than I’ve ever been in my life!”
Chalfant, who’s active in film, too (her latest movie was “Bob Roberts”), is originally from San Francisco. Yet she has lived all over the world: Hawaii, Florida, California, England, Spain, Italy. That’s what happens when one works in regional theater, and she has done plenty of that.
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But New York has been home to her and her family (husband Henry Chalfant, a documentary filmmaker; son David, a musician; and daughter Andromache, a student) since 1973.
Yet for the five years until “Angels” first opened in New York, her family and the apartment here saw her only intermittently. A good part of her life has been tied up with “Angels” since 1988, when she was in its first reading at the New York Theater Workshop on East 4th Street. She was in the original “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika” in Los Angeles, returning home when the plays transferred.