Interview: Kathleen Chalfant Shares Details About Dorothy Lyman's New Play WE HAVE TO HURRY, Streaming Live in May

Stage legend Kathleen Chalfant is set to star in Dorothy Lyman's new play, We Have To Hurry, which will be streamed live via Broadway on Demand for two performances only, Saturday, May 1 at 8pm and Sunday, May 2 at 3pm.

Chalfant stars alongside Elliot Gould and Jeanne Lauren Smith in this poignant play centered on Margaret and Gil, two 70 year-olds living through mandatory isolation in adjacent condos in a retirement community in Florida, who learn to take a chance on life and love in their later years.

Directed by Patricia Vanstone, We Have To Hurry, produced by Stuffed Olive, Inc. and Davina Belling, will be donating all profits from the streaming to The Actors Fund Home East and West.

Tickets, priced at $15 per household, and VIP tickets with a Q&A and livestream after the show are $25 per household. Tickets are available to purchase HERE!

We spoke with Kathleen Chaflant about how she relates to this play, her year doing virtual theater, and much more.

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How are you? How have you been doing during this time?

I'm fine, we've been fine! Henry and I have weathered the pandemic very well I have to say. We're the lucky people, the people who could stay safe when we needed to stay safe, and we got vaccinated quite easily. And I've had, oddly, a fair amount of work during this time. I was in a little part M. Night Shyamalan's new movie called 'Old', which because of the pandemic, meant that I spent six weeks in the Dominican Republic in October and the begging of November. And Henry could come part of that time too, so that was sort of heavenly because I didn't have much to do in the movie, so lots of time to swim in the ocean and hang out in the sunshine! And then I just got back from shooting a pilot in Toronto.

Let's talk about We Have to Hurry. How did you become involved in this production, and what were your first thoughts when you read the material?

I heard about it because I knew Dorothy Lyman the playwright a long time ago when we were both in the early days in New York. I'm not sure Dorothy remembers but I remember Dorothy! The producer, Davina Belling, she and her husband Larry are old friends of mine, I've known Davina and Larry as a couple, Larry is a playwright. Oddly enough, Larry and I went to the same high school, not at the same time, Larry was there a little ahead of me, in Oakland, California, called John C. Fremont High School. We'd discovered that a few years into our friendship.

In any case, I think that's why Dorothy sent me the script. Of course, I'm now 76 and understand that's actually old, you know! You sort of think, "Hmm, isn't that odd, I guess I'm an old person!" But, this was a wonderful play about how in some essential way, how old you are doesn't matter until it does, I guess. I recognize the people in the play, and I've recognized, in a way, also, the woman's reticence. She's an interesting character because in a way she's being tempted to start a new life after having had quite, I think, it feels like a happier, satisfying old life, except that her husband has died and now she's left the place she knew and moved to Florida. Which is a kind of non-place, a place she had no roots.

This play is about isolation and connecting with one another, and love for one another, which is especially poignant during this time. How do you feel that you personally relate to the material and how do you think other people will relate to it?

There's a paradox for many of us about this time, which is that we have slowly... many of us have come to embrace what my friend, the playwright Winter Miller, calls 'the quiet'. And it's difficult to give it up. And there is a little bit of that in Margaret, because there is a way in which this enforced isolation also gives you control over your life in a way that you don't always have in the big world and when there are no limiting circumstances. So, that's interesting to me.

What is the rehearsal process like for this play?

We're going to rehearse once this week and then a few times next week and the week after. The director, Patricia Vanstone, has done versions of it already, so she knows the material and knows how it works, because they've done a version of the play in Canada. She's in Toronto.

Are you excited to get to work with this team?

Yes, I oddly also have a strange connection with Elliot! He and I were both in a series that didn't [get picked up] actually called 'Doubt' a few years ago. But we shot many episodes of it.

It's so nice to get to work with people that you are more familiar with, I'm sure that makes for a great environment.

It does, and all of this is entirely serendipitous, none of the people with whom I have a connection are otherwise connected with each other. It's not as though we belong to a theater company and you're working with people you know in that way, this is a sort of theater company in the sky I guess, and one of the perks of the Zoom world is that you can be anywhere. I recently did an audio play, it wasn't on Zoom, but we used Zoom to connect, for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, of Ellen McLaughlin's adaptation of Shakespeare's 'Pericles'. It was a big podcast that we recorded, and there were, maybe, fourteen of us who were everywhere, all over the country. And I have done a couple of projects with people who are out of the country too.

You've done a lot of virtual productions and audio productions over the past year, which is so amazing. Have you learned anything new about yourself as an actor doing work virtually?

I do realize that the luxury of being able to read and not learn lines is quite seductive! Because right now I'm in the midst of learning the lines for a play, the first play that I will have done in person, which is a play by the playwright Karen Malpede, called 'Blue Valiant'. And we are doing it outside on Memorial Day weekend at an art farm in Pennsylvania, and I'm needing to learn the lines and I realize I have to make myself do that! [laughs]. And then I belong to a theater collective called The Commissary, which does a lot of in-ear work, which is that we reproduce, for the most part, interviews. They've been mostly interviews on political subjects and a lot of important moments about black history. There was a program called Lessons in Survival that was done by The Vineyard Theatre that included famous interviews with James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni and Angela Davis. So, that's been a very interesting kind of work, because what you do is to hear the voice of the real person in your ear, and then speak it simultaneously, and it's a little bit like having someone in your brain. That's a completely new kind of work.

Jumping back to We Have to Hurry, how do you hope that audience members walk away from this show feeling? What do you hope they take away from this play?

I hope they walk away with a kind of joy in possibility that the two characters have at the end of the play, well, three characters, the daughter, recognizing this chance that the two central characters have taken. They've made a leap in the direction of possibility at a time when, I don't think it's so true now, but I certainly know when I was growing up, 76 seemed impossibly old, my own father died at 71, and my mother at 78. But I think our sense of life, life going on with blood in it, has changed, perhaps.

I definitely think it has. I think people look at age and time differently now, which is a wonderful thing.

It's true. And it's also true that the Baby Boomer generation was enormous, there were lots and lots of us. And so, our sort of trajectory is the world we all know. I mean, if you look at politics, the president is 78, Nancy Pelosi is 81, you know, and they're all there and hard at work, no sense that they'll retire or that their gifts are waning, on the contrary. It's a different world than the one I think my generation grew up in.

Do you have any final thoughts? Anything you'd like to share?

I'm very happy to be doing this and I hope it's of interest to people! I'm very glad that Dorothy decided to write a play, it worked out very well!

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