The Seagull

In the Summer of 2001, Mike Nicholas amassed a landmark cast to bring Anton Chekhovs timeless play to the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park – free for all to watch. Apparently, it was Streep who selected ”The Seagull,” a tragicomic masterwork that gives her the plum part of Arkadina, an aging actress whose vanity trumps her talent. Ms. Streep said she read up on the history of working women in 19th-century Russia. ”They were hookers or actresses,” she said. ”Arkadina is supporting a brother who is 16 years older and a son who will not work. Blame is heaped on her for a lot of things in the play. She’s the convenient one. The boss is always at fault. But there’s really nothing wrong with her son’s arms or legs or body. Excuse me, ‘Why is this my fault?’”

Armed with her ideas about Arkadina, Ms. Streep came to Mr. Nichols’s Manhattan office in February 2000 for a reading of ”The Seagull.” The reading was arranged after Nichols had called George C. Wolfe, the producer of the Public Theater, to ask if he would produce the play. Among the actors at the reading were Kevin Kline and Natalie Portman, who were later cast. It took a year to clear all schedules for the all star cast – which would also include Christopher Walken, John Goodman, Debra Monk and Philip Seymour Hoffman – to appear. All star power aside, “the biggest difficulty is the airplane noise,” Mike Nichols told Entertainment Weekly ahead of the play’s premiere.

Marcia Gay Harden, who was fresh off an Oscar win for “Pollock” when she joined the cast, remembered the difficulty working with Mike Nichols during production. Sharing a dressing room with Streep, “at one point I sobbed to her and I said, ‘I don’t think Mike likes me.’ And she said, ‘I don’t know if he likes you or not. And it doesn’t matter. I don’t think he likes Masha. And it’s your job to stay loyal to your character.'” Years later, according to Harden, Nichols would apologize to her, saying “I was really hard on you during The Seagull, wasn’t I? Even Philip Seymour told me I was really hard on you.’ And I said, ‘Well, you were.’ And he says, ‘Who knew? You’re one of the greatest actresses in America.'”

☆   Drama Desk Award – Outstanding Actress in a Play