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  And yet they did, occasionally. In one class, Meryl and Franchelle Stewart Dorn performed a scene from Jean Genet’s The Maids. They were in a dance studio the students called the “mirror room,” and the two actors used the mirrored walls to reinterpret the scene, using their reflections as alternate selves. No one in the class quite understood what it meant, but Lewis was rapt.

  Consciously or not, Meryl would create her characters as composites of people in her life: a vocal inflection here, a gesture there. Cast as an old woman in a Richard Lees play, she adopted an odd physical tic, twitching her hand like she was strumming a harp. Afterward, she told her classmates that it was borrowed from her aunt. The voice had been her grandmother’s.

  In November, the second-year class put on Brecht’s Edward II in the Experimental Theatre (the “Ex”), a cramped space downstairs at the University Theatre. Steve Rowe played the title role, and Meryl was Queen Anne. She kept her focus, even when the Yale Daily News ran a caption calling her “Meryl Sheep.”

  Christopher Durang was cast as her son. “We rehearsed it for a couple of weeks and it wasn’t going well,” he recalled. “Now, the director had mentioned that he wanted to use a circus conceit in the staging, but when the costume parade came around, Meryl was dressed like a trapeze artist: she had beads on her chest, beads on her crotch—they made noise whenever she walked. Well, Meryl put this on and shot the director a look of daggers. She said there was no way she’d perform in that outfit.” The beads went.

  Meryl was determined to prove her worth to the people who mattered. One night, William Ivey Long came to drop off a costume in her dressing room and saw blood in the sink. With all the pressure she was putting on herself, Meryl had developed awful stomach problems—she worried she was getting an ulcer. Before the performance, she had thrown up.

  She looked at him. “Wi’m,” she said. “Don’t tell.”

  THOUGH SHE HAD vanquished her reputation as “the pretty one,” Meryl was a radiant presence on campus. Classmates could spot her from down the block flipping her lemon hair—a burst of color amid the ersatz Gothic façades. All the more remarkable, then, that her breakout role at Yale would be one for which she made herself hideously ugly.

  The part came courtesy of the school’s resident jesters, Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato. Chris had grown up in Catholic schools, before majoring in English at Harvard. He had got into Yale on the merit of an absurdist play called The Nature and Purpose of the Universe. Albert, likewise a lapsed Catholic, had come from Philadelphia. Both were gay, and both were running away from religious backgrounds that had no place for them, finding refuge in menace. (They tended to write plays about evil nuns.) Chris showed up late for the first day of classes with a pronounced limp. Albert saw instantly that he was faking it. They became inseparable.

  Unlike some of their classmates, they were too hopelessly flamboyant to hide their sexuality. “We were like Christmas trees walking lit down the street,” Innaurato said. But while Albert was openly catty, Chris was sly, with a cherub’s face and a viper’s wit. Brustein, who took a quick shine to him, called him a “deadly piranha with the manners of an Etonian and the innocence of a choirboy.”

  When a Yale gallery held an exhibition about William Blake and Thomas Gray, they were asked to write and perform a scene. They dressed as priests and mashed up fifty plays in five minutes. One minute, Chris was Laura from The Glass Menagerie. The next, Albert was Eleanor Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello. Then they sang Mass to the tune of “Willkommen” from Cabaret. Midway through, a woman in the audience said to another, “Come, Edith!”—and they left in a huff. But Howard Stein, the associate dean, thought the show was hilarious and urged the duo to perform it at the Cabaret.

  Their collaboration continued with a madcap spoof of The Brothers Karamazov, performed at Silliman, one of Yale’s residential colleges. The play was shot through with allusive glee: Dostoyevsky meets the Three Stooges, with cameos from Djuna Barnes and Anaïs Nin. They billed it as “The Brothers Karamazov, starring Dame Edith Evans” as Constance Garnett, the famed British translator of Russian classics. The audience arrived to discover that “Dame Edith Evans” had broken her hip, and the eighty-year-old “translatrix” would be played by Albert in a mustache and a floral hat. Once again, mischief was their meal ticket: despite complaints, Howard Stein booked it for the Ex in the spring.

  But there would be changes. The play was renamed The Idiots Karamazov, and the female roles would be played by women. That meant rethinking the Constance Garnett part. The playwrights had conceived her as a witchy, sexually frustrated hag in a wheelchair, serving as absentminded narrator. When she wasn’t smashing a monocle or screaming at her butler, Ernest Hemingway, she would vainly try to make sense of the proceedings:

  CONSTANCE:

  The Brothers Karamazov. This is one of the greatest novels ever writ in any tongue. It deals with the inexorable misery of the condition humain. Hunger, pregnancy, thirst, love, hunger, pregnancy, bondage, sickness, health, and the body, let us not forget the body. (Shudders luxuriously.)

  Who could pull off this grotesque tour-de-force? The answer was as inspired as it was perverse: the pretty one, Meryl Streep. In The Lower Depths, she had shown that viciousness could be charming. Could she make it funny, too?

  The catch: the director was the dreaded Tom Haas. When Chris and Albert suggested the idea of casting Meryl as Constance, he balked: “Have you ever seen Meryl be good?”

  The young playwrights persisted, and got their wish.

  Meryl threw herself into the role, shedding whatever vanity she had. Even as Chris and Albert wrote her more and more spastic soliloquies, Haas would leave her off of the rehearsal schedules. Silly as it was, Constance was an enormous part, and she needed time to discover the character. Was the director sabotaging her?

  One day, Meryl cornered Albert at the Hall of Graduate Studies. He and Chris and Sigourney Weaver would usually gather there for meals, bouncing jokes off each other or griping about school politics. Now in her third year, Sigourney still wasn’t getting any decent parts at the Rep. Instead, she found her own path, starring in whatever absurdist spree Chris and Albert were putting up at the Cabaret.

  Sure enough, Meryl found them in the dining hall. “Can I speak to you privately?” she told Albert, pulling him aside. “What can you do to get me to come to rehearsals? Tom won’t let me in.”

  Albert replied that Haas had shut him and Chris out, too. The director had taken to cutting their punch lines and slowing the pace, while instructing the actors to play their scenes with dead seriousness. Startled, the playwrights went to Howard Stein, begging to be let in to rehearsals of their own play. They weren’t in a position to lobby for Meryl as well. When they did mention it, Haas insisted that Meryl got worse the more she rehearsed—better to leave her on her own.

  A few weeks later, Albert saw Meryl in the alley that connected the University Theatre with the Cabaret. She was visibly upset.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  Meryl vented her frustration: “He won’t call me to rehearsal. I was going to ask him—he wouldn’t even look at me.” Her speeches, besides being long, were dense with academic references, and she barely got her own jokes. “I really need work,” she said.

  “You know,” Albert said, “I’ve played the part.”

  She had almost forgotten. “How did you do it?”

  With that, Albert burst into his grand Edith Evans impersonation: “Weeell,” he trumpeted like a drunk Lady Bracknell, “I just talked like thiiis.”

  Her mind was turning. “That’s actually pretty helpful,” she said. She went home and percolated: How to make this camp caricature her own?

  When she was finally invited to rehearsal, Meryl came in with a full-fledged comedic persona: the grand, erratic, batty Constance Garnett. She even fashioned her own scratchy wig and prosthetic nose, with a bulging mole on the end. She looked like the Wicked Witch of the West.

  S
oon Constance—the framing device—dominated the play. In the first act, the Karamazovs sang a vaudeville number called “O We Gotta Get to Moscow.” One night, Meryl joined in with an obbligato. It was so funny and unexpected that it got written into the show. “You knew more because she was doing that,” said Walt Jones, who composed the score. “You knew more about that character, how central she was to the event, that she was causing this play to happen in her mixed up, crazy mind.”

  Haas wasn’t amused. He still “had it in for Meryl,” Durang said. “Haas also thought Meryl took too much focus away from another character’s speech at the end; Haas told her to do less. So she did.” Days before tech, fate gave her a boost: Haas came down with the flu and left the second act to his student assistants, who reinstated the original wacky tone.

  By the time Haas recovered, he seemed to have caught on to the new screwball pace. During one run-through, he sat in the audience and snapped his fingers—Faster! Faster!—as the actors scrambled to keep up. When they came out for notes, Meryl said, in front of everyone, “That was the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever been through in theater up to now.”

  Haas looked at her blankly. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Here are the notes.”

  The play opened in the spring of 1974. Nutty and cryptic as it was, the students recognized it as a homegrown hit, with the irreverent sensibility they had forged at the Cabaret. Smack in the center of the action—or, rather, whipping around its perimeter—was Meryl Streep. At the end, for reasons unknown to anyone but the playwrights, Constance morphs into Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. In a gossamer wedding dress designed by William Ivey Long (“It was the very first time I worked with silk tulle”), she wheeled into a pink spotlight and sang a lament:

  You may ask,

  Does she cry,

  Unassuming translatrix,

  Could it be she’s the matrix,

  The star of the show,

  If so, you know

  She’ll never let it go . . .

  Not only had caricature deepened into pathos; she was also displaying her vocal agility, melting from a Broadway belt into a fragile, floating high note on “let it go,” which sputtered away like a deflating balloon. Some people assumed she was a faculty wife, an actress of fifty or sixty, at least.

  The first few nights during the curtain call, as the audience howled with approval, she would wheel up and jab the front row with her cane, yelling, “Go home! Go home!” The playwrights loved the ad-lib, but Haas told her to cut it out. So the next night she mimed a heart attack and died dramatically. “We knew that she was upping Tom,” Durang said.

  Meryl’s performance, Michael Feingold said, combined “outrageous extravagance and the completeness of belief.” Nothing was fake. Nothing was hammy. Constance’s delusions were perfectly reasonable to her, which made them all the funnier. Bobby Lewis thought it was the most imaginative farcical performance he’d ever seen.

  Most important, she had impressed the person whose opinion really counted: Robert Brustein. The play fulfilled his vision of antinaturalistic, Brechtian theater, as did its leading lady. “Meryl was totally disguised in this part,” he recalled in Making Scenes. “Her aquiline nose was turned into a witch’s beak with a wart on the end, her lazy eyes were glazed with ooze, her lovely voice crackled with savage authority. This performance immediately suggested she was a major actress.” He wrote in his diary: “Meryl Streep, a real find.”

  Ecstatic, he scheduled The Idiots Karamazov for the Rep that fall.

  JUST AS MERYL was finding validation onstage, her love life was getting complicated. Her two suitors, Phil Casnoff and Alan Rosenberg, were well aware of each other’s existence. Her relationship with Alan was vague: something more than friendship and less than romance. That was enough to irk Phil, who had been cast as the Teen Angel in the Broadway production of Grease.

  Things came to a head one night in the dead of winter, when both men found themselves at Meryl’s place. Phil had come to town on short notice, expecting to spend time with his girlfriend. But she had made plans with Alan. When she broke them, he marched over in a rage. The rivals got into a screaming match.

  “Why the fuck are you here?”

  “I was supposed to be with her tonight!”

  Before they could come to blows, the two men realized that Meryl was gone. Fed up with their machismo, she had slipped out without a coat. Not only was it freezing, but the streets of New Haven were dangerous after dark, with the students constantly dodging muggers after long hours in the rehearsal room. Alan and Phil went out in search of Meryl, quarreling all the while. But it was no use: she had disappeared into the New Haven night.

  She and Phil had been together for more than a year, and Alan knew he was at a disadvantage. Still, he was around when Phil wasn’t. They would go for weekends on Cape Cod, and he bought her gifts: glass beads, a Christmas plate from his family’s department store. Meryl would confide her anxieties: she was having nightmares about professional failure, what Alan called her “abiding fear of not succeeding.” She was obsessed with the book The Limits to Growth, about how civilization would someday exhaust the Earth’s resources. Her bedroom looked out over a tranquil square, but she missed the woods of Bernardsville. “I later found out that it was the quietest spot in New Haven,” she would recall. “The point is I thought it was the noisiest corner on earth, so noisy I couldn’t sleep nights.”

  Alan decided to go for broke. One day, when Meryl was idling in his apartment, he proposed marriage. Knowing it was a long shot, he made it seem off the cuff: no kneeling, no ring. But he meant it. “I think we could do wonderful things together,” he told her.

  They talked about it a bit and laughed. Somehow, the conversation trailed off to another subject. She hadn’t given him a yes or a no, which was, in essence, a no. Alan knew she wasn’t serious about him, not like he was about her. Phil was still in the picture, and, regardless, she wasn’t ready to settle down with anyone.

  In February, Bobby Lewis split the class in two: half would perform Genet’s The Balcony, the other half Saul Bellow’s The Last Analysis. Meryl was cast as the Pony Girl in The Balcony, a small, kinky part for which she wore a corset, lace-up boots, fishnet stockings, and a horse’s tail. Alan was the lead in The Last Analysis, a part that Bellow had originally written for Zero Mostel (who had turned it down for Fiddler on the Roof). The role intimidated Alan—he was a young man, not a rotund Borscht Belt–style buffoon.

  His nerves, like Meryl’s, turned physical. He became severely dehydrated, and Meryl had to take him to the campus hospital. After a few days of bed rest, he returned in time to perform. Afterward, his friends gathered backstage and congratulated him on pulling off the impossible. But they also reported that Bobby Lewis had left at intermission. Rosenberg was incensed. At the next class, Lewis gave a detailed critique of the first act. When he started making more general observations about the second act, Alan raised his hand.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “but I heard you walked out of the play after the first act. So why are you talking about the second act?”

  Lewis admitted it. He hadn’t liked the direction.

  Alan’s face went red. “Bobby, we all paid a lot of money to go to this school,” he said. “If you didn’t like the way we were directed by one of the directing students, then maybe you should have hung in there and watched the play. Maybe we could use your help!”

  After leaving the class in a huff, he went to Howard Stein and told him that he was withdrawing from the program. Two days later, he packed up his apartment. There was no time for goodbyes, even with Meryl. And yet he knew that the blow-up with Lewis was just a front. Had Meryl accepted his proposal, he could have endured all the pressure and the egos and the bullshit. Without her, what was the point?

  “What I was really running away from,” he said, “was her. And my feelings for her.”

  The acting class was down two.

  THE YALE REP ended the spring season with a ribbit. I
n London, Brustein had asked the Broadway director Burt Shevelove to stage a musical version of Aristophanes’ The Frogs in the swimming pool of the Payne Whitney Gym. The show would serve as a frivolous postseason lark, and a chance to make some quick money for the Rep.

  To compose the songs, Shevelove enlisted Stephen Sondheim, with whom he had written A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. At forty-four, Sondheim was midway through a run of landmark musicals, including Company and Follies. With Sondheim came his orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick, and with Tunick came a full orchestra. Soon the postseason lark became a splashy extravaganza with a cast of sixty-eight, including twenty-one swimmers in frog costumes and netted jockstraps, drafted from the Yale swim team.

  To fill out the chorus, Brustein grabbed whatever drama students he could find, including Christopher Durang, Sigourney Weaver, and Meryl Streep. No one knew quite what was going on. “I remember coming in, getting in that pool, sidling up to Chris Durang, and saying, ‘What’s happening?’” Kate McGregor-Stewart recalled. “He said, ‘I don’t know!’” Bored and amused, the chorus members joked about throwing Sondheim in the pool. Ralph Redpath, who had played Ernest Hemingway in The Idiots Karamazov, got Meryl to teach him the butterfly stroke.

  Sondheim, who found the whole thing mortifyingly unprofessional, saw Brustein as a sneering academic without producing chops. (It didn’t help that Brustein had criticized Sondheim’s work in print.) Brustein, meanwhile, was aghast at how lavish the show had become, complete with a clown car full of Broadway-size egos. One day at rehearsal, he publicly thanked the company and crew for their hard work. Afterward, Sondheim blew up at him for neglecting to thank the musicians. On top of that, the acoustics of the pool were awful, to the point that Sondheim added a lyric to the opening number: “The echo sometimes lasts for days . . . days . . . days . . . days . . .”