With all of her strength

NEW YORK — KATHLEEN Chalfant is recalling the first time she rented the British actress Miriam Margolyes' house in Tuscany, now an annual summer ritual for the Chalfant family. "Let's see, it was 10 years ago, just after my brother's death," she says, digging into a plate of crab salad. "It will be 10 years. . . ." She pauses. "Oh, my God, that's today."

Just the barest flicker of emotion crosses over the 63-year-old actress' luminous blue eyes, even though Chalfant was close to her brother, Alan Palmer, a San Francisco restaurateur and political fundraiser. Her moving astringency is typical of the emotional discipline she has brought to myriad great performances, including her turns -- rabbi, Mormon mother, Ethel Rosenberg -- in Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" (for which she received a Tony nomination); her Vivian Bearing, the acerbic John Donne scholar dying of cancer in Margaret Edson's "Wit"; and, more recently, her imperious matriarch in Sarah Ruhl's "Dead Man's Cell Phone."

Now Chalfant is applying that extraordinary rigor in a new play, "Red Dog Howls," in the role of Rose Afratian, a fierce and haunted 91-year-old survivor of the massacres of Armenians that began in 1915. Red Dog HowlsThe memory play by Alexander Dinelaris examines the legacy of violence and its effect on Rose's young grandson, Michael. On the cusp of beginning his own family and while going through his dead father's personal effects, Michael discovers letters that lead to a grandmother he's never known, uncovering terrible wounds for both. The play opens Wednesday at the El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood.

"Kathleen is one of the few great actresses of the stage who can handle stern comedy and enormous gravitas," Dinelaris says. "The character may be 91, but the audience has to believe she could live another 30 years. Kathleen conveys the age as well the strength of a much younger woman."

Indeed, in the rehearsal that preceded lunch, under the watch of director Michael Peretzian, Chalfant sparred with Matthew Rauch, playing Michael, in a scene that alternated between Rose's dry humor and the tension of two strangers assessing the dangers and opportunities of a first encounter. Yet for all of Chalfant's cerebral cool, what one notices is an earthly sensuality -- traces of the independent child of the '60s she once was.

"It is a surprise," acknowledges Dinelaris. "But it's there in the way she moves, in the kind of visceral attachment she has toward food and in the softness she has toward family."