Heart of a Survivor

Every night, Kathleen Chalfant goes into her dressing room, puts on her makeup and prepares to die. She does this in homage to her brother, who died of cancer, and to all those others who have suffered through that disease. And in the process of portraying the last days of Vivian Bearing, the 50-year-old ovarian cancer-ridden professor of English literature who is the pivotal character in “Wit,” Chalfant has won more acclaim than ever before in her career.

Margaret Edson’s play had its premiere at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa in 1995, where it was developed with Megan Cole in the lead, but it is Chalfant who has come to define the role. There are many who have lamented that the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which continues to run off-Broadway, wasn’t eligible to win both Chalfant and Edson Tony nods because it never got a chance to move to a Broadway theater. But Chalfant isn’t complaining, and she isn’t claiming credit for the show’s success.

A steely grit, elegance of bearing and extreme modesty all immediately strike one upon meeting this 55-year-old actress. Despite the accolades that have been showered upon her in the 15 months since the show opened in New York, she is far from a diva.

Which is particularly relevant because the part she resumes, as “Wit” opens at the Geffen Playhouse on Wednesday, requires a kind of rigor and confidence in her craft that might invite some arrogance. Not only does she have to play an often cuttingly funny academic who is onstage throughout the 90-minute intermission-less show, she must do so without any hair on her head, often while throwing up.

But while Chalfant has an air that “Wit’s” director, the recently deceased Derek Anson Jones, called “patrician,” in life she also has a constant glint of humor in her eye, recalling that she is, after all, the same actress who famously introduced Parts 1 and 2 of “Angels in America” first as an aged rabbi and then as the wry male commentator known as the “World’s Oldest Living Bolshevik.”

The character of Vivian Bearing, on the other hand, is certainly arrogant enough. A scholar of poet John Donne, leader of the 17th century Metaphysical school, Vivian knows how to be literate and witty, but not how to live a life. Advised as a young student that she needs to get out and experience the world, she goes to the library. Told at the height of her prime that she has advanced metastatic cancer that is likely terminal, she sequesters herself in the hospital, sees no one but the medical staff and seeks comfort, to little avail, in memories of her academic past.

The story of “Wit” is of Vivian’s trials with the inhumanity of doctors more interested in research than in her well-being, and of her struggle with an experimental chemotherapy that not only doesn’t heal but also strips her of her dignity. A feisty and always well-spoken intellectual, Vivian views the disintegration of her body with emotional distance. But the response Chalfant has drawn from audiences and critics has been anything but that.

Peter Marks, writing for the New York Times, called her performance “as intelligent and uncompromising as you’re likely to come across on a New York stage these days.” Nancy Franklin, in the New Yorker, called it “an excruciating, powerful performance,” and Linda Winer of Newsday called Chalfant a “remarkable actress.”

Perhaps the breakthrough from a respected character actress to star came for Chalfant because “Wit” means so much to her. First shown the play by Jones in 1996, she immediately shared the script with her older brother, Alan Palmer, a political fund-raiser with an interest in the arts.

“I got the play about two months after my brother was diagnosed with cancer,” she says during an interview in an office at the Geffen. “I read the play, and he came to visit. He always was my mentor, and I gave him the play and wanted to know if it was true to his experience. We knew that his cancer was incurable, and at that time, I think we thought it was fairly imminently terminal. He read it, and he came up with tears streaming down his face and said, ‘Yes, it’s true. And also, if anyone ever asks you to do this play, you’d better do it.’ ”

As it turned out, the parallels between Palmer and the character of Vivian Bearing did not end there, Chalfant says. Like Vivian, Palmer went further with treatment, despite his prognosis. When he came to New York, Chalfant says, her brother’s doctors became more aggressive. “The decision was made to treat his cancer. He’d been told in San Francisco not to treat it,” Chalfant says with some hint of regret. “Somebody told me, ‘When they tell you it’s treatable, but not curable, you’d better listen.’ ”

Chalfant’s brother moved to New York to live with Chalfant and her husband, Henry, in an apartment in their Manhattan townhouse for the last two years of Palmer’s life. “In the beginning, I learned from the play how to help him,” she says of when she first played the role at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn., in 1997. In the end, she says, his dying taught her how to play the role.

Palmer died as “Wit” was about to be staged again, in New York in 1998. Because of the thoughtfulness of a producer who cut her loose for two weeks from shooting Stephen King’s “Storm of the Century,” Chalfant was able to live with Palmer in his hospital room for the three days before his death. “They did it out of kindness,” she says of the time off she was given. And in a sense, she admits, it changed her life.

Watching Palmer die, she learned how to do it for audiences, and Jones, in particular, noted in a telephone conversation, just before his death from complications from AIDS on Monday, that it made a major difference in her portrayal of Vivian. “I think that what was already strong and deeply human became much more so,” Jones said. “Like a singer finding a new note.”

For Chalfant, it was a matter of breaking life down to its essentials. That one should not die without knowing what it is to be kind to others--something her character has to work to learn. That life involves a sensitivity to core humanity that is sometimes lost in the race to cure. To Chalfant, “Wit” provides an essential message to audiences, and she speaks of the play and a philosophy of life as if they are one.

“At the beginning and at the end, what’s important are simplicity and kindness,” she says but hurries to caution: “It’s not to say that you shouldn’t do all the other stuff in the middle. I don’t think that the play should be read as an indictment of the intellectual paradigm, because someone who was indicting that couldn’t have taken such glee in writing this intellectual play.”

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Chalfant is a woman of definite principles--her involvement in “Angels in America,” with its loud statement about the need for redemption and compassion in the highly charged political and personal battles with AIDS in the ‘80s and ‘90s, was not by accident. She played not only the the two old men, but also a Mormon mother who, in befriending a man with AIDS, becomes key to the play’s elaborate plot.

In “Wit,” the question of whether the play is redemptive became an issue for Chalfant. Aware that a story about a death from cancer needs to be about more than just sentiment, she immediately wondered how the play would affect people with cancer, as well as people who had experienced it through loved ones.

“When I first read the play,” she says, “I had that question in my mind. It mattered to me that it be redemptive, but, also, I was so moved by the character that it was a case in which I don’t know whether I would have had the gumption to turn it down whatever my answer would be.

“I discovered that you couldn’t tell whether it was redemptive until it began to play in front of an audience. And it became clear that it was. And by the time I came back to the play in New York, I understood why--because the last part of the play is triumphant. She’s free. It isn’t a play about the medical establishment attacking this poor person. It is, in fact, the opposite. It is about a person who has taken a very narrow, intellectual view of life. And it’s worked for her. And it’s about what happens when she finds herself in a circumstance when what’s always worked doesn’t work. So in the end, as Maggie [Edson] would say, it’s a play about grace.

“ ‘Wit’ is a nonpolitical play,” Chalfant continues in explaining how she chooses roles. “It is fiercely political in its arena, but it is not about politics, it’s personal. I do look increasingly at the political bias of work I do, particularly in television and movies, because clearly I’m a child of the ‘60s, and it seems to me that the political center has moved to the right. There are some things that I can’t support in good conscience; I have the luxury not to do that too. If I were entirely self-supporting, if I were in my middle 30s and raising a family, the cost of my conscience would be higher. So since I have the luxury, it’s the least I can do.”

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Chalfant was raised in San Francisco by parents who ran boarding houses, although at 50 her father became a merchant seaman. She majored in the classics at Stanford University, and it was in that department that she met her husband of 31 years, Henry--now a co-author of books on graffiti and spray-paint art and a documentary film producer whom she calls the “eminence grise of hip-hop.”

“I always wanted to be an actor, and I forgot when I went to college,” she says with a laugh.

After graduating in 1965, the couple moved to Spain, which was then dominated by Franco. Their son David--now a bass player and producer for the Nields, a folk fusion rock band--was born in Spain, but they left soon after because they were uncomfortable with the political climate.

Next stop was Italy, and while Chalfant renewed her interest in acting there, studying in Italian, they again left for political reasons. After participating in a protest against the Vietnam War, they realized that to exercise their feelings properly, they could no longer live as expatriates.

Moving back to the States, they found themselves in Woodstock, N.Y.--post-concert era--with a new daughter, Andromache, who is now studying set design at New York University. Andromache was born during the third week of rehearsals of “Major Barbara,” in which Chalfant was to play the lead, she says. “I was in the hospital and I learned the lines. I came right out of the hospital and did the run of the play. About six months later, I fell over. I was tired.”

Finally settling on a life in Manhattan, Chalfant has raised her family while working steadily as an actress. Her first “big job,” as she puts it, was in “Jules Feiffer’s Hold Me,” in New York in the late 1970s, which she reprised in a commercial run at the Westwood Playhouse (now the Geffen) in 1979, replacing Julie Kavner.

“I didn’t enter the mainstream of the theater in New York until about 10 years after that,” she says. In 1989, she met director David Schweizer, now a close friend, while they were working on Charles Mee Jr.’s “The Investigation of the Murder in El Salvador” at New York Theatre Workshop.

“I’ll never forget it,” Schweizer said recently. “I was working with Ruth Maleczech of Mabou Mines, but Ruth was ill and Kathy appeared. She just sailed into the room, and was both aloof and warm, and remote and available at the same time. She was well-known at the time, but completely unpretentious about playing a part that somebody else had been taking.”

Around that time, too, Chalfant’s future was sealed by a then-fledgling work: “In 1988, Tony Kushner asked me to be in the very first reading of the very first version of ‘Angels in America,’ ” she remembers. “He told me later that he’d written the part for me. All of the key parts were already there. So for the next six years I was caught up in ‘Angels in America.’ ” She stayed with the show throughout its two-part Broadway run, along with playwright Ellen McLaughlin, who played the angel and who is one of many people Chalfant names as a close friend.

Schweizer, also a friend of Kushner, was around during much of the development of “Angels” and saw Chalfant’s career transformed. “She moved from the category of a really wonderful character actor to someone with a higher charisma quotient, a star,” he says. “ ‘Wit’ put her on stage center. ‘Wit’ is not really working unless it knocks your socks off. It’s very high-stakes.”

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As she prepares for the Los Angeles opening, still wearing the inch-long hair that has taken her since August to grow, Chalfant says that she is dreading shaving her head again. Her husband, currently in New York, will be here to shave it for her, she says, and she will be bald throughout the run, looking to the world--as she does to her audiences--more like a chemo patient than she would personally like. But not wearing a wig has become a badge, of sorts, and as she said of the need to follow her political conscience, again she says, “It is the least I can do.”

With a mix of compassion and self-deprecating humor, she admits that being bald has helped her to understand how it feels to be ill, to be looked at by strangers as if she were. And for those who are ailing, she says, the identification has been powerful. From after-performance discussions done in New York (and planned for after each Tuesday-night performance at the Geffen), she has connected directly with her audience.

“People who are ill are most ambivalent about coming,” she says. “People who are in remission come, and it seems to help them. Quite often people who are ill are told by their friends not to come, and then they do, but they come by themselves. And then we’ve had a great deal of recidivism. Because it’s a safe place.” *

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Cast, Experts Explore Themes

Immediately after all Tuesday evening performances of “Wit,” audience members will be invited to stay and talk with cast members about the show. On Feb. 7, the Geffen Playhouse will sponsor a symposium related to the play that focuses on the intersection of art, medicine and compassion at the end of life. Participants will include Kathleen Chalfant; Karen J. Stanley, oncology nursing consultant and founder and chairwoman of Claremont Coalition Concerned With End of Life Issues; Paul Sellin, retired UCLA professor and John Donne specialist; and David Kesler, author.

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“Wit” opens at the Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood on Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. and continues through Feb. 20. Regular schedule: Tuesdays-Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Feb. 9, 2 p.m. $20-$42. (310) 208-5454 or Ticketmaster: (213) 365-3500.