"
Far Away," the apocalyptic parable by Caryl Churchill that has scared and impressed most of the city's theater critics, will get a new victim late next month: Kathleen Chalfant, who will take over for Frances McDormand on Dec. 27 for a three-week extension of the show, playing at New York Theater Workshop in the East Village.
Ms. Chalfant, famed for her work in "Wit" and "Angels in America," hasn't seen the play yet but says reading it gave her the chills. "It seems spectacularly necessary in these terrifying times," she said.
Ms. Chalfant, who also has a recurring role on the CBS show "The Guardian," says her stint in "Far Away" ends on Jan. 18; after that, she starts rehearsing for an Off Broadway run of "Talking Heads," a collection of seven monologues by Alan Bennett that had a starry run in Los Angeles this year."
Thoughts, wrote Nietzsche, are shadows of our feelings: always darker, emptier, and simpler than these. And the written word, it strikes me, is but a shadow of our thoughts. 
