Vita and Virginia: Frances Sternhagen to substitute for Kathleen Chalfant

Two time Tony Award winner Frances Sternhagen (The Good Doctor, The Heiress) will substitute for Kathleen Chalfant in Vita and Virginia for two performances in March while Ms. Chalfant shoots a role in the film 'Duplicity'� with Julia Roberts and Clive Owen.

On 17th and 31st March only, Ms. Sternhagen will play 'Virginia Woolf' opposite Patricia Elliott's 'Vita Sackville-West' in Eileen Atkins' adaptation of the correspondence between the two celebrated writers.

Presented by The No Frills Company and directed by Pamela Berlin, Vita and Virginia began its limited engagement at The Zipper Theater, on 11 Feb and will continue playing Monday nights only through to 28 Apr 2008.

Vita and Virginia: About two extraordinary 20th Century women exploring their passions, literary and otherwise, takes place in the 1920s and 1930s and through the first years of WWII. It deals, in a very timely way, with women seeking their place in the world as they face personal and professional conflicts as well as the looming world war.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the 20th century. She was a prominent member of London's Bloomsbury set. Her most famous works include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), a thinly disguised account of her long love affair with Vita Sackville-West who she met in 1922.

Vita Sackville-west (1892-1962) was an English poet and novelist best-known for her long narrative poem The Land for which she won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. In addition to creating extraordinary gardens at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, she was famous for her aristocratic life style, her strong marriage and her passionate relationships with women including Virginia Woolf with whom she had a 20 year love affair.

Their revelatory letters to one another, which Ms. Atkins has adapted for the stage, chronicle their changing relationship as well as their creative lives as writers in the early and mid 20th Century.

Vita and Virginia was originally produced in 1992 at the Chichester Festival with Penelope Wilton and Eileen Atkins and presented Off-Broadway in 1994 starring Vanessa Redgrave and Eileen Atkins.

Eileen Atkins is as acclaimed for her writing as she is for her acting. She was last seen on Broadway when she starred as 'Sister Aloysius' in 'Doubt (2006). She co-created the universally popular TV series 'Upstairs, Downstairs' and won the Evening Standard Award for Best Film Script for'Mrs. Dalloway.'�

Kathleen Chalfant, who received Tony and Drama Desk Award nominations for 'Angels in America' (1993) and the Drama Desk, OBIE, Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics Awards for 'Wit' (1998 Off-Broadway), will also be appearing in Dead Man's Cell Phone at Playwrights Horizons during the run of Vita and Virginia.

Patricia Elliott, who won the Tony, Drama Desk and Theatre World Awards for her Broadway debut as Countess Charlotte in Stephen Sondheim's 'A Little Night Music, (1973)' received a second Tony nomination for 'The Shadow Box' (1977).