Her Again Page 7

  Sound nice? It was hell.

  “I feel instinctively that a school, or a place that professes to be a school, should make an effort not to judge so arbitrarily,” Sigourney Weaver would say. “It was all politics. I still don’t know what they wanted from me. I still think they probably had this Platonic ideal of a leading lady that I have never been able to live up to. And would never want to.”

  “The first year sent me into therapy,” said Kate McGregor-Stewart, class of 1974. “I was struggling to prove my worth and still be allowed to be there, because a lot of people got cut at the end of the first year. I think we went from eighteen to twelve.”

  Linda Atkinson, class of 1975: “They didn’t take your strong points and build on them from there. The point was to destruct all of that and then find something else to build up in you. Which is sort of stupid, right? You’re sort of talented, and So-and-So says, ‘Throw that out the window.’”

  Wendy Wasserstein called it the Yale School of Trauma.

  “When I was in drama school, I was scared,” Meryl would recall. “It was the first time I realized this isn’t something that is fun, that it had a dark side.” Yale “was like boot camp, shaving your head. It made you humble. A lot of it was breaking your spirit, and out of your survival instinct you start gathering what’s important.”

  None of this was apparent when she arrived in New Haven in the fall of 1972, having gotten in on a scholarship. She knew she loved acting and drawing and nature, and she told her new classmates that her favorite place in the world was the Laurentian Mountains, north of Montreal. She had just turned twenty-three.

  She moved into a three-story yellow Victorian house on Chapel Street, down the street from the Yale Repertory Theatre. The house had previously been used by Alcoholics Anonymous, and occasionally someone would peer through the windows, looking for a meeting. Now it was the kind of place where students could drift in and out, living there for a few months, or a semester, or a couple. The first night, the housemates gathered in the kitchen to discuss the house rules. Everyone would write their names on the food in the pantry, they decided. Meryl would share the first floor with a directing student named Barry Marshall, along with his wife and their corgi, called Little Dog.

  On the second floor was William Ivey Long, a dandyish North Carolinian who had never been this far north. Having studied Renaissance and Baroque architecture at the College of William and Mary, he had recently dropped out of a doctoral program at Chapel Hill (thesis topic: Medici wedding festivals) to study stage design at Yale under the master teacher Ming Cho Lee. He had grabbed the last strip off a “roommate wanted” flyer and was still sleeping on a cot.

  Later in the semester, they would get another housemate: a tall, patrician beauty named Susan Weaver, who had decided at thirteen years old that a longer name suited her and started calling herself Sigourney. Everyone knew her father was Sylvester Weaver, the former president of NBC, but you wouldn’t guess it from her chaotic fashion sense: hippie rags and motorcycle jackets, selected from color-coded heaps laid around her room like garbage piles. She looked like Athena disguised as a bum. At Stanford, she had spent some time living in a treehouse. When Christopher Durang met her, she was wearing green pajama pants with pom-poms, which she said was part of her “elf” costume.

  Now in her second year, Sigourney still baffled the faculty. They saw her as a leading lady. She saw herself as a comedienne. They harped on her appearance, comparing her to an unmade bed. At one evaluation, they told her she looked sullen in the hallways. “I’m sullen in the hallways because I’m not getting cast in anything!” she shot back. When she showed up to her voice lesson the following day in a white blouse and pearls, the instructor sneered, “You know, Sigourney, you don’t have to be loved by everybody.” For her next evaluation, she found a piece of muslin from the costume department, drew on a giant bull’seye, and pinned it to her jacket—a symbol of her sartorial persecution. “Hit me,” she said.

  Disillusioned, she moved off campus to get some distance from the school, and wound up on the same floor as William Ivey Long. “Oh, you’ve got to come and see the Cabaret,” she told him his first night in New Haven. “My friends are performing in it.” Soon, he was sitting at a table with Chianti bottles and checkered tablecloth, watching the strangest performance he had ever seen in his life. It was performed by two second-year playwriting students: Albert Innaurato, who was dressed as the Mother Superior from The Sound of Music, and Christopher Durang, in a blue taffeta evening gown. After the show, an academic with a droopy mustache sat down and started pontificating on art and the theater. It was Michael Feingold, who would become the chief drama critic at The Village Voice.

  “I didn’t know what was happening,” Long recalled. “I didn’t understand the theater they were doing.” He was ready to pack his bags and go home.

  The next day, he was in his kitchen, staring at a “blond goddess” who called herself Meryl Streep. When she heard that Long was studying design, she asked, “Would you like to see my costume sketches?” Then she showed him her drawings, beautifully imagined and rendered. Oh, my God, he thought. She’s an actress and she draws like a dream. Now he was really ready to bolt.

  “Every class at the drama school thinks that somebody was a mistake,” said Walt Jones, a directing student in Meryl’s class. “And I thought it was me.” Of course, most of them were worrying the same thing. But who would admit it? Better to keep your eye on your classmates and try to figure out who didn’t belong. Because if it wasn’t one of them, then it might as well be you.

  DRAMA SCHOOLS ARE founded on a dangerous kind of calculus. Attract theatrical personalities, at an age when their ambition vastly outstrips their experience, and place them in a community so small and insular that the most valuable resources—attention, praise, parts—are in perpetually short supply. Still, the Yale School of Drama fed on its own special brand of crazy, and that was thanks to one man: Robert Brustein.

  With his booming voice and ironclad ideals, Brustein presided over the drama school like it was his own private fiefdom. Having made his name as the combative drama critic for The New Republic, he believed in Artaud’s gospel of “no more masterpieces”: theater should be challenging, political, and blisteringly new. He loathed the naturalistic dramas of Arthur Miller, extolled the epic theater of Bertolt Brecht. Between semesters, he summered in Martha’s Vineyard, socializing with the likes of Lillian Hellman, William Styron, and Joseph Heller. His most famous book was The Theatre of Revolt.

  Years before he became its dean, Brustein had attended the Yale Drama School as an actor. He found the training archaic. In phonetics lessons, the students were taught to widen their a’s and trill their r’s. They listened to recordings of John Gielgud and learned to recite their lines in a “mid-Atlantic accent,” which Brustein concluded to be unsuitable for the stage, since nobody lives in the mid-Atlantic except fish. “It was all fans and flutterings and bowings and scrapings and Restoration plays,” he said. He dropped out after a year.

  So when Kingman Brewster, the president of Yale, asked him to take over the program in 1966, he balked. The Yale School of Drama, as far as he was concerned, was one of those “stagnant ponds” where theater went to die. If he did agree, he’d need license to make sweeping changes: new staff, new curriculum, new everything. “My plan was to transform the place from a graduate school, devoted to fulfilling requirements and granting MFA degrees, into a professional conservatory, concerned with developing artists for the American stage,” he wrote in Making Scenes, his memoir of the “turbulent years at Yale.”

  When Brustein arrived in New Haven the next term, he was “the liberal on a white horse,” according to his first associate dean, Gordon Rogoff. The new Yale School of Drama wouldn’t produce “personalities,” the kind you see in the movies. It would mint repertory-theater professionals who could tackle anything from Aeschylus to Ionesco. “I wanted to develop an actor capable of playing any role ever written,�
� Brustein wrote, “from the Greeks to the most experimental postmodernists.” Imagine his dismay when a promising young actor from the class of 1970, Henry Winkler, went on to become the Fonz on Happy Days.

  Intrinsic to his vision was establishing the Yale Repertory Theatre, a professional playhouse that would work in tandem with the school. Students would perform alongside hired actors, in bold, genre-busting productions that mocked bourgeois tastes. There was Brustein’s production of Macbeth, in which the witches were extraterrestrials who beamed in on flying saucers. There was Molière’s Don Juan, which began with a “blasphemous ritual sacrifice”—blasphemous, because the Yale Rep had made its home in the former Calvary Baptist Church. “The middle-class burghers were in shock,” Rogoff said.

  When he got to Yale, Brustein vowed to run the school as a participatory democracy. But the turbulent years—radicalism, Black Power, sit-ins—transformed him, like Robespierre, into an autocrat. By 1969, the Yale Daily News, which had once applauded Brustein’s “open, permissive approach to dissent,” was decrying his “authoritarian, repressive policies” and calling for his resignation. Brustein was defiant. “I had tried to be a mellow, reasonable administrator and had presided over uprisings, disruptions, and cancellations,” he wrote. “I no longer felt very avuncular.”

  By the time Meryl arrived, he had alienated almost everyone. Yale undergraduates thought he was shortchanging them by not allowing access to graduate classes. Audiences were confounded by his experimental programming. Graduate students were in constant rebellion. “You know the Sara Lee slogan in the TV commercials—‘Everybody doesn’t like something, but nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee?’” one student told the New York Times Magazine. “Well, around here that might be paraphrased to read, ‘Everybody doesn’t like somebody, but nobody doesn’t dislike Robert Brustein.’”

  The newly assembled class of 1975 knew, to some extent, that they were entering a cult of personality. But here was the strange thing: when they got to campus for their first semester, Brustein was gone. Exhausted by eight years of turmoil, he had taken a year off to be a guest critic for The London Observer. In his place sprang a cadre of petty tyrants, who were about to make Meryl Streep’s first year at Yale a torment.

  ON WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13TH, Meryl walked down Chapel Street to attend her first day of classes. Of her thirty-nine classmates, nine were enrolled in the acting program: four men, five women.

  The curriculum, according to the official Drama School bulletin, would consist of “a highly disciplined period of training, when all students are serving in an apprentice capacity. It is during this period that the development of their talent, expansion in outlook, and artistic contributions to the theatre are evaluated.” If the evaluation went awry, students could, and would, be put on academic probation, the first step toward getting kicked out altogether.

  Twice a week, they would gather in the University Theatre for Drama 1, “Introduction to Yale Theatre.” It was taught by Howard Stein, whom Brustein had appointed acting dean. Stein was universally beloved; he was Brustein’s buffer, the smiling, encouraging good cop you could go to in a bind.

  On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings was Drama 128, “Voice Training,” with instruction in “correct breathing, tone production, articulation, and corrective tutorial work.” On Tuesdays and Thursdays was Drama 138, “Stage Movement,” for training in “acrobatics, mime, and studies in the expressiveness of gesture and body composition.” This was the domain of Moni Yakim and Carmen de Lavallade, a former prima ballerina who had joined the Rep in hopes of reinventing herself as an actress.

  Meryl enjoyed these classes, with their pragmatic focus. “The things that I honestly really think about now and rely on are physical things,” she said later. In movement class, they learned about relaxation and strength. In voice, they read sonnets and learned that a thought is a breath and a breath is a thought. “In the singing class, where people were not singers, Betsy Parrish said, ‘It doesn’t matter, singing is expression, it’s undiluted, unobstructed by your brain and all your neuroses. It’s pure. It’s music. It comes out from the middle of you.’ I learned all those things. But acting, however, I don’t know how people teach acting.”

  And yet acting was taught, in Drama 118—the course Meryl would come to dread. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoon, the students would file into Vernon Hall, the converted frat house where she’d had her audition. In the basement was the Yale Cabaret, a lovingly disheveled black box where the drama students could let loose and stage their own work, no matter how thrown-together or bizarre. Directly above it was a wide studio with wood floors and weak sunlight, strewn with folding chairs and costume racks. This was where Drama 118 would meet, with the goal of “establishing an Ensemble work approach” and honing specialized skills such as “improvisation, scene study, circus, elementary text breakdown, and masks,” under the instruction of Thomas Haas.

  “Tom Haas was Meryl’s bane,” Brustein said. “He was my bane, too, as it turned out. He was an unfortunate human being who had the great capacity to pick out the most talented people in the class and want to throw them out for being talented.” Others had a warmer view. Meryl’s classmate Steve Rowe called him “one of the luminaries”—so brilliant that Rowe followed him to Yale from Cornell, where the thirty-four-year-old Haas had done part of his Ph.D. But the class of 1975 clashed with him from the start. Privately, they would make fun of his “wall eyes”: one went this way, the other went that way. There was talk that his wife had run off to join the women’s movement, leaving him with two small sons: the kind of newfangled family dynamic that would inspire Kramer vs. Kramer.

  His personal troubles might have darkened his mood in the Vernon Hall rehearsal studio, where Haas led the first-year students in improvisational theater games. There was the subway exercise, where you had to walk into a subway car and immediately establish who you are and where you’re going. There was the painting exercise, where you had to embody a classic work of art. That first day, Haas gave the class its inaugural assignment: improvising their own deaths. “He said most people didn’t die well enough,” Linda Atkinson recalled.

  To kick off the first round of deaths, Haas called up a cocky acting student named Alan Rosenberg. Rosenberg had double-majored in theater and political science at Case Western Reserve University. His parents, who owned a department store in New Jersey, had given him a couple hundred dollars to apply to graduate schools, but he lost most of it in a poker game. With only enough left for a single application, he had auditioned for the Yale School of Drama and somehow gotten in. Like everyone else, he thought he was the mistake.

  When he walked into the studio, Rosenberg saw a gorgeous young woman sitting on a folding chair. “I was knocked out,” he recalled. “I looked at her and couldn’t stop looking at her.” Meryl had a beauty he couldn’t quite define, “like a work of art you can contemplate forever.”

  Unfortunately for him, she had a boyfriend: Philip Casnoff, who had joined the Green Mountain Guild in the summer of 1972. Meryl and Phil had costarred in a play by Peter Maeck, in which they alternated nights in the same gender-neutral role. After the summer, he got a job touring the country in Godspell, but would visit New Haven on days off. Phil had flowing hair and a Prince Charming face. As with Bruce Thomson in high school and Bob Levin in college, he and Meryl looked good together.

  Rosenberg got up to perform his death scene, hiding his insecurity behind a veneer of goofiness. He performed a pantomime of a guy walking down the street who gets attacked by a swarm of killer bees. The students laughed. Success?

  He sat back down and watched the others. One student pretended to set himself on fire. Another shot himself in the mouth and slowly bled to death. Then it was Meryl’s turn. Her demise was one that few in the room would forget: she performed an abortion on herself. Not only was this disturbing to watch—and a hell of a way to make a first impression. It was also timely. Roe v. Wade was still being argued before t
he Supreme Court and wouldn’t be decided until the following January. In the meantime, women were forced to come up with their own solutions to unwanted pregnancies, often with tragic results.

  One thing was clear: Meryl brought a level of commitment to her work that was unmatched in the room. It was “incredibly intense,” Rosenberg recalled. He noticed that the colors of her face would change when she was onstage—she was that deep into the character. Rosenberg, however, had been flip. After everyone took a turn at self-destruction, Haas said, “I don’t think Alan quite understood what the exercise was about.”

  Rosenberg went home elated and distraught. On the one hand, he’d met the woman of his dreams. On the other, Haas had asked him to be more “specific,” and he was stumped. He called a doctor friend and asked for a specific way to die. The friend said: bone-marrow embolism. Back in class, Haas called Rosenberg up for a second try. He pantomimed a guy driving a car who gets a flat tire. He pulls over and tries to fix it, but the jack splits in two and he breaks his leg. Within twenty seconds, he dies. It was still flip, but it was better than bee stings. And if it didn’t impress Haas, maybe it would impress Meryl. In any case, Haas informed them, the class would be practicing its death scenes through Thanksgiving.

  SLOWLY BUT SURELY, the students began to realize that Meryl Streep could outdo them in almost everything. “She was more flexible, more limber, had greater command of her body than the rest of us,” her classmate Ralph Redpath said. She danced. She could swim three lengths of the pool without taking a breath. She made delicious soufflés with Gruyère cheese. In tumbling lessons with the Olympic gymnast Don Tonry, she surprised everyone by doing a back flip from a standing position. In fencing class, taught by the Hungarian fencer Katalin Piros, she wielded her foil like Errol Flynn. Someone asked if she had fenced before, and she replied, “Not much.” Who was this person?