It’s been 20 long years since Meryl Streep last appeared in a play in New York. And from the evidence now available at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, she has been depriving herself and her audiences of some serious pleasure. Ms. Streep is playing Arkadina, an aging actress of considerable charm and even greater vanity, in Mike Nichols’s very starry and very spotty production of Chekhov’s ”Seagull,” which was scheduled to open last night. And when Arkadina makes her entrance, as a stage diva should, swanning down a staircase, don’t be surprised if a welcoming serenade starts up in your head, like the one sung by those dancing waiters to the star of ”Hello, Dolly!” For it is indeed nice to have this Oscar-winning actress back where she belongs. Two decades in front of movie cameras haven’t diminished her capacity for looming large from a stage, and with a head-to-toe physicality that gives the lie to Pauline Kael’s famous suggestion that Ms. Streep acts only from the neck up.

Known largely as Hollywood’s tear-streaked queen of broken hearts, Ms. Streep is here often luxuriantly, self-mockingly funny. Yet you see the anxiety behind Arkadina’s grand, silly postures; like Chekhov himself, Ms. Streep has drawn a portrait of comic ruthlessness and gentle understanding. In other words, theatergoers who continue to wait hopefully to obtain the limited number of free tickets left for ”The Seagull,” which has been extended through Aug. 26, are not doing so in vain. But be warned that while this production may offer, as the old MGM slogan boasted, ”more stars than there are in heaven,” only two of those stars, Ms. Streep and Kevin Kline, shed much in the way of illuminating light. Few playwrights demand greater instinctive harmony within an ensemble than Chekhov does. Granted, his characters are often so hermetically self-involved that they don’t even listen to one another. But it is essential that we believe they all breathe the same befogged air.

Yet throughout this latest ”Seagull” I kept feeling that I had to readjust frequencies to receive all the different stylistic signals. Mr. Nichols, a much and justly awarded director of films and plays, here appears to have encouraged his cast members to retreat to separate corners to find their characters and then come out acting. Now when you’re dealing with a company that includes the highly charged, idiosyncratic presences of stars like Christopher Walken, John Goodman, Natalie Portman, Marcia Gay Harden and Philip Seymour Hoffman, you had better make extra sure that they’re speaking the same language. Otherwise you wind up with what this ”Seagull” gives us: the feeling of watching a movie that has been spliced together from different eras and styles. And this despite the careful atmospheric handsomeness of Bob Crowley’s sets and costumes and Jennifer Tipton’s lighting. The disjointedness is underlined by the miking of the actors for open-air projection, which dislocates voices to the extent you sometimes think you’re listening to a performance that has been entirely dubbed, like those old internationally cast movies from Italy. And monologues are generally addressed straight to the audience, as though by on-the-spot commentators. There are sparks of electricity all over the place, but they rarely connect into a circuit.

This is especially unfortunate when you consider that ”The Seagull” is a roundelay of romantic longings. At the center of the chain are two urban visitors, Arkadina and the novelist Trigorin (Mr. Kline), to the country estate of Arkadina’s ailing brother, Sorin (Mr. Walken). There they disrupt the unhappy but relatively placid lives of an assortment of frustrated souls. Most notably there are Arkadina’s son, Konstantin (Mr. Hoffman), an artistic firebrand whose greatest talent is for self-sabotage, and the provincial girl he loves, Nina (Ms. Portman), who longs to become a famous actress and falls hard for Trigorin. Chekhov uses this basic quadrangle to explore the varied forms – all impure, but some less so than others – of love and art, and the havoc wrought by the myopic pursuit of them. Since Arkadina and Trigorin have already basically fulfilled their destinies, the emotional center of ”The Seagull” has to be with the younger pair and especially Nina, as their creative and romantic instincts develop. ”To me, Nina’s part is everything in the play,” Chekhov wrote. But it’s an extremely difficult role, one that perversely finds its strength in victimhood.

Ms. Portman, the ravishing young movie star who did well by the title role in the Broadway revival of ”The Diary of Anne Frank,” doesn’t yet show the fluidity to convey Nina’s strength of passion as well as fragility. She’s pretty, poised, intense and artificial, bringing to mind one of those earnest starlet heroines from mid-20th-century movies, like Linda Darnell or Jeanne Crain. Mr. Hoffman’s Konstantin is closer to third-generation Actors Studio. This immensely gifted performer, so splendid in ”True West” last year, gives off real emotional ferocity and sorrow. But he’s still all feelings in search of a concretely defined character. Mr. Walken’s Sorin, on the other hand, might have come from the Catskills, with his Mort Sahl-like delivery and vaudevillian antics. (You never for a second believe that he’s ill.) He’s sort of entertaining, but to what end? Ms. Harden’s comically strident Masha also has a flavor of the Borscht Belt, as does Stephen Spinella as her hapless suitor and Debra Monk as her mother.

As the philosophizing doctor, the estimable Larry Pine takes his character’s detachment to the point that he seems more linked to us than to anyone onstage. I kept thinking of the Stage Manager in ”Our Town.” John Goodman, as Sorin’s vulgar estate manager, at least makes you understand why he behaves so badly with Arkadina, and you really believe that he loves her in his clumsy way. Mr. Kline’s very postures accent the passivity in Trigorin and the attendant shirking of moral responsibility, turning spinelessness into a physical stance and an existential choice. He seems, surprisingly, less assured in his line readings, occasionally coasting on that famous romantic baritone. But he and Ms. Streep, with whom Mr. Kline memorably appeared in ”Sophie’s Choice” in 1982, are splendid together in the erotic scene where Arkadina systematically seduces Trigorin into returning to town with her. Ms. Streep, who looks luscious in Mr. Crowley’s turn-of-the-century frippery, cannily brings out the strategist in Arkadina.

She’s a balance between ego and intelligence, selfishness and compassion. Self always gets the upper hand, but you’re aware of the peripheral existence of nobler traits, especially in Arkadina’s conflicted scenes with Konstantin. Detractors of Ms. Streep’s screen acting have complained of her overly researched approach, but you can only be grateful for the solid sense of back story she brings to this role. When you see her romping like a kid in a nursery with Mr. Walken, you suddenly know all you need about Arkadina’s childhood and the extent to which she remains there. And when she turns a perfect cartwheel to demonstrate her enduring spryness, you appreciate both the depths of her vanity and her dangerous tenacity. Ms. Streep isn’t afraid of making Arkadina look foolish, and she may occasionally seem to oversignal her character’s comic distaste and jealousy. But Arkadina does come from a theatrical tradition of exaggeration, of gaining applause at all costs.

Ms. Streep’s performance itself is by no means selfish. On the contrary, she gives expansively to her fellow cast members, feeding them emotional cues that they mostly fail to pick up on. If this ”Seagull” is to move to Broadway, as has been speculated, it has to develop the art of reciprocity. In the meantime Ms. Streep has left a large but finely engraved calling card with the New York theater world, serving notice that she is back and still very capable of entrancing a live audience. Let’s pray that this time she stays.