Her Again Page 10

  On opening night, a tony Broadway crowd, among them Leonard Bernstein and Harold Prince, descended on New Haven in a circus of air-kissing and quarreling over seats. To Sondheim’s unpleasant surprise, Brustein had invited the New York critics, including Mel Gussow of the Times, who compared the show favorably to “a splashy M-G-M epic.” Had he focused his attention on the bleachers to the left, he would have noticed a slender blonde dressed like a Greek muse, consigned to the chorus for one of the last times in her life.

  Despite rapturous reviews, The Frogs garnered some backlash. A neurologist from the medical school wrote Brustein an angry letter, complaining that the “scanty” costumes exposed the swimmers’ backsides. “In your outrage and embarrassment over the bare buttocks of the swimmers,” Brustein replied, “you apparently failed to notice that the show also featured an exposed breast of one of the actresses. Whatever your preference for male behinds as opposed to female mammaries, I hope you will agree that, in this time of equal rights for women, your failure to take note of this fact is an insult to the opposite sex.” Meanwhile, the New Haven Women’s Liberation Center complained that the show treated women as “sex objects.” Brustein retorted, “I think your satire on the humorlessness of the extremist elements of our society is priceless.”

  The mocking tone was indicative of Brustein’s feelings toward second-wave feminism. The go-to response was disdain. When Ms. magazine sent him a survey with questions like “How many plays about women have been produced at your theater?” and “How many plays at your theater were written or directed by women?” Brustein sent back a scoffing questionnaire of his own: How many articles by or about men had they published? How many of their editors were men?

  Brustein’s contempt made life difficult for a first-year playwriting student named Wendy Wasserstein, who had arrived in the fall of 1973. The product of a middle-class Jewish household in Brooklyn, Wasserstein was frizzy-haired, zaftig, and effusive. Having studied history at Mount Holyoke, she was interested in writing plays about women’s lives, but her jokey, naturalistic style clashed with Brustein’s avant-garde ideals. He would openly question her admission to the school, calling her work “sophomoric”—never mind that Christopher Durang, whose work was overtly sophomoric, was one of his favorites. In class, she didn’t fare much better. At the first reading of what would become Uncommon Women and Others, one of the men said, “I just can’t get into all this chick stuff.”

  Wendy hid her insecurity—about her weight, her talent—behind a girlish giggle. Even as her mother called every day at seven a.m. to ask if she had found a husband, she was neglectful of personal hygiene, spending weeks on end in the same velvet dress with a rose embroidered across the bosom. Like Sigourney, she was uninterested in (and incapable of) dressing the way people expected.

  She was most comfortable around gay men like Chris, with whom she instantly bonded. They had a writing seminar together, and Chris noticed Wendy zoning out during class. “You look so bored, you must be very bright,” he told her after class. (Decades later, she put the line in her Pulitzer Prize–winning play The Heidi Chronicles.) They started swapping notes on their messed-up families. “She had her own sadness inside her,” Durang said, “but I didn’t see it back then.”

  Women were more nervous around her: everything they feared about themselves she wore on the outside. “There was something about Wendy I found very scary to me,” Sigourney told Wendy’s biographer. “She was a more naked version of the vulnerability I felt.”

  Meryl was exactly the kind of woman Wendy spent her life avoiding: the tall, thin, blond shiksa goddess who seemed to breeze through life. She was inclined to distrust such women, who she imagined wanted nothing to do with her. But Meryl was kind, and Wendy would later rank her as No. 8 on her list of “Perfect Women Who Are Bearable.” “She’ll never pass you a poison apple,” she wrote. “Meryl just goes about her business.”

  On costume duty, required of all the drama students, Meryl and Wendy mended dresses and cracked each other up. But there was a quality to her laughter that unsettled Meryl: it seemed less a genuine release than a contrived offering to the general bonhomie. “To me she always seemed lonely,” Meryl would recall, “and the gayer her spirits and the more eager her smile, the lonelier she seemed.”

  Meryl stayed in New Haven for the inaugural season of the Summer Cabaret, an off-season outgrowth of the student-run theater. Those who remained staged ten (barely rehearsed) plays in ten weeks. One week, Meryl was Lady Cynthia Muldoon in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound. The next, she was Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, or the bitter sister in Durang’s The Marriage of Bette & Boo, for which the Cabaret was transformed into “Our Lady of Perpetual Agony Catholic Church and Bingo Hall.” The costumes were whatever junk William Ivey Long found lying around, and the sets were held together with spit and luck. Before a performance of Dracula Lives, the smoke machine ran out of juice, and the gang replaced it with drug-store mineral oil, which turned the entire theater into a greasy, acrid swamp.

  Without air conditioning, the Cabaret was sweltering. Nevertheless, some company members squatted on the third floor, until the campus police kicked them out. On Saturdays, Meryl would make French toast for everyone at her apartment off campus. Before shows, they would serve Junior’s cheesecake and soda, clandestinely sweeping cockroaches off the plates before setting them down. Then they’d stay up late cleaning for the next day. At their favored pub on Chapel Street, they practiced “the Yale Stretch”: whenever they were about to badmouth someone, they would crank their heads around to check who might be in earshot.

  One week, the company was so exhausted that they decided to put on something completely improvised. The result was The 1940’s Radio Hour, a wartime spoof. Dressed in fedoras and fur coats (which nearly gave them heat stroke), the actors made up the show as they went, speaking into vintage RCA microphones and hurling crumbled Styrofoam over their heads to signal snow. Meryl’s solo was the 1938 standard “You Go To My Head.” “You melted when you listened to it,” said Walt Jones, who eventually brought the show to Broadway, sans Meryl. By the second night, the line was around the block. Nobody knew how word of mouth had got out that fast.

  Amid the frolic, Meryl was looking toward her future. Bobby Lewis hadn’t taught her much about acting, but he had found her an agent at the newly formed ICM: Sheila Robinson, one of the firm’s only African-American reps. Meanwhile, through Alvin Epstein, a veteran actor with the Yale Rep, she got her first professional voice-over gig. The married animation team John and Faith Hubley had adapted Erik Erikson’s theory of the eight stages of psychosocial development into a series of cartoon vignettes, called Everybody Rides the Carousel. Meryl and her classmate Chuck Levin were hired for “Stage Six: Young Adulthood.”

  The two actors went into a recording studio in New York, where they were shown a storyboard and asked to ad-lib a scene dramatizing the conflict “intimacy versus isolation.” They improvised a charming seven-minute scene of a young couple in a rowboat. When the man gets a splinter, the woman tenderly removes it with a safety pin. As they pull away, their faces transform into two-faced masks. They wonder, separately: Will they even be together in two years? The question must have reverberated in Meryl’s mind, as she weighed her ambitions against the attentions of guys like Alan and Phil.

  On another trip to New York, she saw Liza Minnelli at the Winter Garden. The entertainer’s “straight-out, unabashed performing”—miles away from the scene studies she did in class—made her rethink her presumptions about acting.

  “If I were not protected by a play, I would die,” she said later. “But I learned something from watching Liza Minnelli. Encountering and truth-telling are the initial steps of acting. But there is a further leap to the understanding of the importance of brilliance, sparkle, and excitement. ‘Performing’ is the final gloss. It’s a means to attract the audience to your character.”

  IN HER THIRD year, Meryl joined the Yale Rep as a co
mpany member, for which she got her Actors Equity card. Brustein, by now well aware of her gifts, cast her in the first show of the season, an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, to be directed by the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda. To play Stavrogin, he hired the sinewy young actor Christopher Lloyd.

  Wajda spoke through a translator—no one was quite sure how much English he understood. But he was taken with Meryl and Christopher Lloyd, and even added extra dialogue for them. He told Feingold, the Rep’s literary manager, “I cut scene in Kraków, but I put back here because your actors are so much better.”

  With Wajda came the Polish film star Elzbieta Czyzewska, an outcast from her home country since her husband, the American journalist David Halberstam, was expelled for criticizing the Communist regime. Czyzewska had an off-center way of working that fascinated Meryl. She would end the first act by slithering across the stage and screaming at Lloyd—“Antichrist! Antichrist!”—with a ferocity that seemed to make the theater quake.

  But the significance of Meryl’s encounter with Czyzewska wouldn’t be apparent for several years. As Brustein’s friend William Styron wrote his novel Sophie’s Choice, he drew on Czyzewska’s Polish speech patterns. Several years later, when Meryl played Sophie on film, her Yale classmates noticed something uncanny: there was Czyzewska, or at least elements of her, refracted through both Styron and Streep.

  After Dostoyevsky, the Rep turned to a Dostoyevsky spoof: the mainstage production of The Idiots Karamazov. Meryl reprised her role as Constance Garnett—without the direction of Tom Haas, whom Brustein had ousted, at the urging of some of the students. Even so, tensions were high as rehearsals got under way. Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato, Yale’s mischievous Tweedledum and Tweedledee, had grown apart. The reason was Wendy Wasserstein.

  Wendy’s infatuation with Chris disgusted Albert, who felt he was being replaced. He would notice Wendy waiting for Chris after class like a lovesick schoolgirl, clearly barking up the wrong tree. In Albert’s mind, Wendy had “poisoned” his friend, exploiting his insecurities. “When you hate yourself, and then someone comes along and loves you for the very thing you hate in yourself, then it’s very hard not to respond to that,” he said later.

  Brustein lorded over rehearsals, driving the cast up the wall. Even in front of Chris, who was playing Alyosha, Brustein would tamper with the script—Chris was so stressed he developed a rash all over his chest. When Linda Atkinson, who was playing Mrs. Karamazov, objected after Brustein cut one of her lines, he called out, “You can get out of my school!” “Good,” she yelled back from the stage. (The line in question was: “Yes.”)

  Even the genteel William Ivey Long, who was doing costumes, reached his breaking point. He had designed a decrepit black-lace-on-magenta number for Grushenka, the prostitute. “She’s supposed to be a whore,” Brustein told him. “She looks like a duchess!”

  “But, Dean Brustein . . .”

  “Change it!”

  As Brustein walked away, William shouted, despite himself: “Fuck you, Bob!” Brustein turned around and smiled a Cheshire Cat grin.

  Meryl, meanwhile, had to re-create the comedic magic of the previous year, this time in a vastly larger space. The stage was steeply raked, and Meryl was constantly on guard to keep her wheelchair from rolling away with her. One night, Durang had to reach out and grab her before she careened into the front row. Still, she loved acting in the wheelchair: “You’re limited, and it frees you.”

  The Rep drew audiences from far beyond the drama school, including critics from every newspaper within driving distance. Meryl’s zany Constance Garnett, who had decisively taken over the play, became her coming-out. Raves came from the Stratford News and the Hartford Courant. Even Mel Gussow, of the New York Times, took notice: “The star role is the translator, Constance Garnett. As portrayed by Meryl Streep, she is a daft old witch (the play is daft, too) in a wheelchair, attended by a butler named Ernest, who eventually blows his brains out.”

  If it wasn’t clear to Brustein before, it was now: Meryl was his secret weapon. The rest of the season would be all Streep, all the time, whether she liked it or not.

  IT’S DIFFICULT BEING an outcast, but sometimes just as hard to be an asset. Wendy and Sigourney knew what it was like to work in the shadows, at least as far as Brustein was concerned. Meryl was now firmly on the other side, the leading lady in a professional company. In the 1974–75 season, she would act in six out of the seven shows at the Yale Rep. She was miserable.

  Under Bobby Lewis, the acting department had become increasingly fractious. The second-year class rebelled after he fired three of the teachers. One student offered to audition him. Students were surly, or simply cut class. When Lewis put up a sign reminding them that attendance was mandatory, someone tore it down. Because of her grueling rehearsal schedule at the Rep, Meryl was missing classes as well, but Lewis was hesitant to reprimand her. Brustein was left with the “distressing job” of calling her into his office and telling her that she would have to start attending class regularly if she wanted her degree.

  Juggling her multiple roles was hard enough. At the Rep, she appeared in a soap-opera satire called The Shaft of Love. One night, Norma Brustein—the dean’s wife, who was playing her shrink—missed an entrance. To stall for time, Meryl ambled around the psychiatrist’s office, inspecting props. Finally, she looked at one of the Rorschach inkblots on the wall and, pretending that her character had found some deep, horrible truth within it, burst into tears.

  In the Brecht-Weill musical Happy End, Meryl was cast in the ensemble. Her one line, shrieked amid crowd babble, was “Where’s Lillian?” “The incisiveness of the moment always knocked people on their asses,” said Feingold. Mid-run, the soprano from the music school who was playing Lillian lost her voice. With only an afternoon to rehearse, Meryl stepped in. Far from getting a break in a minor part, she was now the lead. Her first time going on, Brustein sat in the front row in a bright-red tie. At intermission, Meryl sent him an urgent message: the red tie was making her nervous and he needed to clear out if he expected her to make it through the matinee.

  Even more stressful was a production of Strindberg’s The Father, starring Rip Torn. Meryl played his daughter, Bertha. Torn was notoriously erratic, inhabiting his role so fully that the cast worked in perpetual fear. He would stop rehearsals to obsess over a minor costume element or prop. During a tech rehearsal, he announced that he wanted to tear down the door on the set. After yanking it from its hinges, he declared: “More resistant. It’s too easy.”

  Elzbieta Czyzewska was playing his wife, and Torn “tended to treat her offstage with the same cruel contempt with which he regarded her in the play,” Brustein recalled. “You just want the New York Times to kiss your ass,” he would say, to which she countered, “If you care so much about this play, how come you don’t know your goddamn lines?” Meryl was stuck between them, like a shuttlecock.

  A student dramaturge who was keeping a rehearsal log captured the tumult. From February 1st: “Torn scares everyone by almost throwing Elybieta [sic] out the window.” February 12th: “Torn starts his scene with Elybieta in Act II by dumping her on the floor.” February 19th: “Torn preoccupied with the guns. Doesn’t think captain should have an antique gun collection.” Meryl, he wrote, “has been having trouble with Bertha because she feels, rightly, that although Bertha is a teenager, the lines are written for a much younger child.”

  Meanwhile, her status at the Rep was eroding her relationships with her classmates. The women in her class had labored for years, expecting a chance to act on the Rep stage. Now Meryl was getting all the parts. While they couldn’t begrudge her her talent, they were demoralized. One actress even went to Kingman Brewster, the president of Yale, and told him, “You know, there are people that are paying to go to this school, and they’re never getting a chance to act.”

  At the end of the fall term, the Cabaret once again held a Christmas show. This time, Meryl poked fun at her own ubiquity, s
inging a winking rendition of Randy Newman’s “Lonely at the Top.” “A chill went around the room,” Walt Jones recalled. “It was icy.” She was back on the homecoming float, isolated by her own success.

  “The competition in the acting program was very wearing,” she would recall. “I was always standing in competition with my friends for every play. And there was no nod to egalitarian casting. Since each student director or playwright was casting his or her senior project, they pretty much got to cast it with whomever they wanted. So some people got cast over and over and others didn’t get cast at all. It was unfair. It was the larger world writ small.”

  That she was on the sunny side of the street didn’t make the pressure-cooker atmosphere any better. Instead, she said, “I got into a frenzy about this. It wasn’t that I wasn’t being cast. I was, over and over. But I felt guilty. I felt I was taking something from people I knew, my friends. I was on a scholarship and some people had paid a lot of money to be there.”

  She was worn down. Her costar was volatile. Her acting teacher was censuring her. The stress was roiling in her stomach. And her classmates were upset about the stage time she was getting—not that she had any choice in the matter.

  Finally, she went to Brustein’s office and said, “I’m under too much pressure. I want to be released from some of these commitments.”

  “Well,” Brustein told her, “you could go on academic probation.” But that was more threat than compromise; she didn’t want to get kicked out of school.

  Meryl had been cast as Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the final production of the season. Could she get out of that? Brustein blanched: he knew she’d be perfect for it. Instead, he countered, why doesn’t she go on as Helena and let her understudy take over in The Father?

  “Impossible!” Meryl said. “Rip would never stand for it. He really thinks I am his daughter. If anybody went on in my place, even if you told him about it beforehand, he would stop the show immediately and say, ‘Where’s Bertha?’”